


Reclaimation

by tisfan



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), F/M, Hydra (Marvel), Infinity Gems, Jewish Wanda Maximoff, Mind Control, Mind Stone, POV Wanda Maximoff, Romani Wanda Maximoff, Unreliable Narrator, Wakandan Technology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2020-01-31 05:36:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 29,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18584842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: By way of Hydra, Wanda is promised great power...When she meets Bucky Barnes, she learns something about great responsibility.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flowerofthewolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowerofthewolf/gifts).



> This fic will update once every 2 weeks.
> 
> ** this fic keeps to Wanda's POV, which includes a lot of hostility against Tony Stark, especially in the early chapters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every effort to save us, every shift in the bricks, I think, "This will set it off." We wait for two days for Tony Stark to kill us. 
> 
> \-- Wanda Maximoff, Age of Ultron

_Sokovia 1999_

She was ten years old. Pietro had kicked her under the table, once, twice. He was always fast. She opened her mouth to complain to her mother when there was a sound. A screaming, whining sound as if--

The ceiling exploded, the floor collapsed--

“Mama! Mama!”

She fell and she was gone, and Wanda was screaming for her. Pietro grabbed her, yanked her backwards -- he was always so fast -- away from the collapsing debris.

“Under the bed, go, go, now!”

Their apartment was so small, the bed wasn’t far. She pushed aside Papa’s workboots and scrambled under.

Another screaming sound--

Pietro pushed in after her, backing her up all the way to the wall.

She was crying, she didn’t understand, what was happening, what was happening to them? Where was Mama?

“It’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” Pietro told her, and she believed him. He was younger than she was, and she always held that against him, teased him about it. That he was younger, immature, a baby. Those twelve minutes were the most important of her life. But right now, he was taking care of her and she was going to let him.

For a long time, nothing else happened. There were screams and sirens outside, dust and debris settling inside.

Pietro carefully rolled over and then said a word that Mama would have fussed about him even knowing. The fact that Mama was never going to fuss at them again occurred to her, and Wanda burst into tears.

Great, jagged gasps, and interrupted by coughing fits as the dust got into her throat.

“Stop it!” Pietro shook her, which only made the coughing worse. “Stop it, there’s a bomb.”

Well, no, really? She knew there was a bomb, it had collapsed the building, they were--

She wiped her eyes against Pietro’s shirt, which didn’t really help, since their clothes were covered in dirt and dust. “What?”

“A bomb, there’s a bomb in the room with us.”

Wanda lifted her head to look.

There was a long, tannish cylinder, half protruding from the wall, as if it had gotten that far and just run out of energy. It wasn’t ticking, not like a bomb on the television shows she sometimes watched. It was just… there. Like a snake. Waiting.

“What’s it say?” Wanda asked, her fingers gripping Pietro’s shirt, her tears drying in her fear.

“Sta-- rk, In us.. Trys?” Pietro was better with the America’s alphabet than she was. He was planning to be a teacher when he grew up.

The building shifted, the floor moved sickeningly under them. Wanda screamed, she--

***

_Sokovia, 2012_

“Come on, come on,” Pietro was shaking her awake. Wanda gasped, jerked upright in bed. They’d taken shelter that night in one of the abandoned blocks, where the buildings were in ruins, and it always reminded her of that night, the night when everything changed.

“Do you have breakfast?” Wanda wondered. They’d have to move on, soon. They’d been involved in protests. Against their own government, against the Americans who were constantly invading. Various police and military forces wanted to arrest them, and they didn’t dare stay in any one place for long.

“I might have done,” Pietro said, proud. “Not here, though. We have to go.”

“Go where, where are we going? Where have you been?” She thought she knew. Pietro had a way about him, tended to find the prettiest person in the room and score himself a little action. Bit of a bulldog, her brother. They’d had just as many incidents of running from angry spouses as they had from cops. “Who was that girl, last night?”

She expected either a name, or a confession that Pietro hadn’t bothered to remember it. Some girl. There was always some girl. What she got instead was, “someone who says they can help us. I said we’d meet up with her and her boss today. So, we need to go.”

Wanda sat back down on the bed -- it wasn’t really a bed, just a few shipping flats and a bundle of blankets -- and eyed her brother. “Sounds like a trap, to me.”

“Come on, Wanda,” Pietro said. “I talked with her for a few hours, she’s got some fascinating ideas. I think w should hear them out.”

“Later,” Wanda said. “There are protests today, outside the capitol. I want to be there.”

“These protests don’t matter, they don’t do any good. We need power if we’re going to fight back.”

“I don’t want to _fight back_ , Pietro,” Wanda said. “I want the fighting to stop. I want justice.”

“I don’t think there’s any other way to get it,” Pietro said. “No one’s listening. So, we need to start being people worth listening to.”

“All right,” Wanda said. She got up and dusted herself off. She was dirty and tired, hadn’t been able to wash up in weeks. She stank, but most of the time she was used to the smell. It didn’t matter anymore. Everyone in Sokovia was short of the basic necessities; food, clothing, shelter. Water. Comfort.

Their country was war-torn. It wasn’t much, but somehow it seemed a crossroads on everyone’s way to everywhere else. Fighting, looting, random destruction. It needed to end.

“But we’re just going to listen. No decisions, not today.”

***

Wanda wasn’t going to listen; the spokesman for the group wore a military uniform, and he was surrounded by men with guns. This was not what she wanted, this was not what she signed up for. She wanted to help people, she wanted the fighting to stop.

“You want your government to protect your rights,” this Strucker was saying. “But I think you know they can’t accomplish that. What you need is power. The power to change the world. We’re looking for volunteers.”

Wanda’s eyes flitted from the armed guards to Strucker, to her brother. “Volunteers that you need guns to speak to?”

“It would be unfortunate if the police were to attempt to interfere,” Strucker said. “They’re only here for my protection.”

“It is guns that made all these problems,” Wanda said. She didn’t trust Strucker, and she was more than a little disturbed that Pietro was hanging off every word.

“The power of our Iron Man, of the Avengers,” Strucker said. “We can--”

“Iron Man?” Wanda interrupted. “You mean, _Tony Stark_?” She hated that man, hated everything about Stark Industries. Stark was a war-monger, a conquerer, and his weapons had destroyed nearly everything she cared about. He was the very definition of evil.

“Yes,” Strucker said. “Why should one wealthy man have all the power? And decide when to use it and when to hold back.”

“You can give us power to destroy Tony Stark?”

“We hope so,” Strucker said.

She exchanged a glance with Pietro. “We’re in.”

***

_Sokovia, Hydra Research Base, late 2013_

Wanda sat on the cot, her knees apart, hands dangling against her thighs. _Volunteered. We volunteered._ She was dressed poorly for the conditions of the base, a simple hospital gown. No shoes. Her legs were bare, her arms were bare. She was cold. So very cold.

Another one had died in the night, another volunteer.

They died screaming.

They all died, screaming.

The cells were made from steel and thick glass. Solid metal walls separated her from her brother. She could hear him, sometimes. Banging on the glass, yelling. They couldn’t talk-- not without yelling. And Wanda was too tired to yell.

_You could do it. If you wanted to. If you believed. You know that--_

Not her thoughts. She shook them away, or tried. The Voice stayed with her, whispering. Always whispering.

_We volunteered for this._

She didn’t lift her head to look at the scepter, she didn’t need to. She’d seen it, inside and out, for days now. It hung in the center of the corridor, accessed from above, the radiation -- not nuclear, Dr. List had told them, but cosmic radiation -- seeped into their prison. Into their cells.

The cells of their bodies were changing, the longer they were exposed.

The other volunteers were dying.

But not Pietro.

Every night, she could hear him, his rapid breathing, his frantic struggles. She didn’t know why he was struggling, she didn’t know what he was struggling with. But she could hear him, and she knew he was strong.

_You are stronger._

“Shut up, shut up, leave me alone!” She was weeping again, clutching her head, trying to make it stop. Soon, as it did every time she was awake, it would dig into her memories, show her the death of her parents, again and again. She would be back in the room while they waited for Tony Stark to murder them, just like her parents had been murdered.

_It was his fault, you should hurt him. You should get your revenge._

“I can’t, I can’t, I don’t know how, I’m not strong enough--”

_But you could be. You could be stronger. All you have to do it let me in. Let me take you and change you and you could be stronger than anyone else in the world. In the galaxy._

“I don’t care about the galaxy,” Wanda sobbed. It hurt when it talked to her, like her skull was going to explode from the inside. She didn't’ know how to make it stop talking to her.

_You volunteered. You wanted this. You wanted the power. I’m giving it to you._

In the cell next to her, Pietro screamed.

Anguished, in agony.

“Pietro! Stop it, stop hurting him, stop--”

_He’s strong. But you’re stronger. You could be stronger._

Wanda shrieked, threw herself against the steel-cored wall of her cell, knowing it was no good, knowing she couldn’t do anything while her brother was in pain--

She clawed at the wall, weeping. Her fingernails splinted, and blood ran down her palms. _I give to you my blood--_

“ **Pietro!** ”

She cracked, splintered into a million jagged shards. Her mind opened in the heat of her frenzy, and she--

Understood.

She raised her hands and called the power.

The entire base rocked, like her rage and her fear and her grief had become too vast to stay inside her body.

“Back down!”

The corridor was full of soldiers. Humans with their guns and their threats. Men.

Hydra.

Wanda sneered, her hands aglow with power, her mind overcome with it. Everything she saw was tinged in reddish power. She could see that one’s mind, his thoughts, that one’s weapon. She pulled and several guns clattered to the floor.

Was someone going to shoot her? Was someone going to make her stop? She lifted into the air, toes leaving the floor.

She laughed. What could they do to her now?

A lemon-yellow fog filled the room, sweet-sticky smelling and--

She crumpled like a dead leaf, falling to the floor.

The world faded around her.

“Well, it looks like we have two successful test subjects, Dr. List,” someone said.

“Yes. Move her to Lab One. Carefully.”

Wanda fell into the darkness.

***

_Sokovia, Hydra Scientific Research Base, 2015_

She didn’t like Dr. List. She didn’t trust him. He looked at her like an object, like a _test subject_. But she tolerated him because they needed him. At least for now.

It had taken her many months to understand her powers, what she could do with them. List drove her, devised tests, taught even as he learned, and so she tolerated it.

But there would come a time, and that time was soon, when they would have no use for him. When everything would fall into place.

She hadn’t expected the Avengers to attack the base.

“Stark,” she told her brother. She was still, essentially, kept in a cell -- I am not locked up to keep me safe, I am locked up to keep you safe. How safe are you, little man? Do you think you’re safe.

Sometimes, those red-tinged thoughts were foreign to her, sometimes she knew they weren’t her voice, that they weren’t entirely her thoughts, but as they came more and more frequently, she didn’t really care.

“Let’s get him,” Pietro said.

“Yes.”

Wanda opened the door to her cell, a bare flicker of thoughts.

“What are you doing out?” List demanded. “You’re not ready.”

“Stark,” she said. “We want him.”

Pietro had already run down the hallway, grabbed their gear, and come back. She dressed slowly, not caring that List was looking at her. Let him look, he’d already seen her, many times when she couldn’t stop him. Let her be the very last thing he ever saw.

“Are you ready?” Pietro asked her.

“Let’s get them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N -- Some of this is garnered from Marvel Comics: Age of Ultron Prelude, This Scepter’d Isle*


	2. Chapter 2

_With these guys he could do it. They speak 30 languages, can hide in plain sight, infiltrate, assassinate, destabilize, They can take a whole country down in one night. You'd never see them coming. -- Bucky Barnes,_ _Leipzig, 2016_

They were going to meet their allies. That’s what Steve said.

The man who had once been James Barnes, and who had once been the Winter Soldier, had no opinions on that.

He’d met one of Steve’s allies, a smart-mouth, gap-toothed asshole, who, despite everything, had better sense than Steve ever would.

_Just like that, we good?_

Sam Wilson didn’t trust the man who was James Barnes, and Barnes didn’t blame him. Barnes had no control over what was in his head. He thought he could get away, he thought he could be free.

He was wrong. Steve would never let him be free. Steve would find him, would drag him out of his safe place, would demand of Bucky, and end of the line, and I’m your friend. Which were chains far stronger than the ones Hydra had put on him. Chains that he didn’t want to resist. Chains that he had to, he had to get away, where no one could find him.

Because all it took were the damn words.

The shrink had ‘em. Barnes wasn’t sure how many copies there were. How many seeds of Hydra out there, just waiting to sprout and grow. Like mold, it could never truly be eradicated.

The shrink -- who wasn’t a shrink, but Barnes didn’t know what he was, didn’t know who he was, just knew what he wanted -- was ahead of them. Was preparing to wake up five more Winter Soldiers. Five more, like him, but worse.

 _This,_ Barnes thought _, this one thing. I must do this one thing, and it doesn’t matter the cost. I have to stop him, and then, maybe, I can be free. Even if I die. Maybe even especially then._

Steve wouldn’t mind dying to serve Barnes’ cause. They were the same cause. The end of Hydra. The end of the line. They would die together, like they were supposed to have done, and everything would be clean. The slate clear. Barnes could stand in front of God and say, _Send me to Hell, but know, in the end, I served my conscious._

Wilson wouldn’t mind dying, to serve Steve’s cause.

Barnes knew fanatical devotion, he knew what unquestioning loyalty looked like, and that was what he saw on Sam Wilson’s face.

He didn’t like it, but he knew that Wilson had already thrown in his cards, he’d already declared himself, and there was nothing Barnes could say that would change that.

Then there were supposed to be _allies_.

Barnes didn’t have an opinion on that. Steve had always made people love him, just by being around. Even back when he was ninety pounds of aggression in an ill-fitting suit -- if someone took the time to talk to him, rather than judging him on his frailty, his spitfire attitude, that someone would find themselves enraptured.

Or at least, Barnes had.

Back in the day, when people called him Bucky.

He kept trying to find Bucky; wasn’t sure he recognized his face in the mirror, wasn’t sure he knew the man Bucky was. Maybe someday, he’d find Bucky again.

In the meanwhile, allies. A dingy grey van was in the parking garage as Steve pulled up.

A lithe man with a severe haircut and muscular arms got out of the driver’s seat. “Cap.”

“You know I wouldn't have called If I had any other choice,” Steve said, shaking the man’s hand and slapping him on the shoulder.

“Hey man, you're doing me a favor. Besides, I owe a debt,” the man said. He was, according to the voice of the Soldier in Barnes’ head, Clint Barton. The Hawkeye. An Avenger. The data was several years without update. Steve had said the man retired from the hero business, but looking at those arms, Barnes highly doubted the veracity of that claim. That wasn’t a man who looked like he’d retired from anything.

“Thanks for having my back.”

Barnes looked up again, a tickle at the back of his neck, a jolting awareness along his spine. A woman came forward. Sweet faced, curvy, but hard. Hard and brittle and beautiful. She was the most beautiful thing that Barnes had ever seen.

“It was time to get off my ass,” she said. She wore several rings on both hands, a red coat, and she glowed, faint, nearly undetectable, with unspeakable power. The Scarlet Witch. The Soldier’s memory said she was Hydra, a volunteer. That was out of date, too. Steve had said she was an Avenger, now. Under house arrest because of Steve’s mistake.

Barnes didn’t really know what that meant, an _Avenger_. A loosely allied group of enhanced humans? Who fought for… causes unknown? Sometimes united against extra worldly threats. The Chitauri. Hydra.

Barnes couldn’t stop looking at her. Even as another ally was introduced. His eyes kept being drawn back to the brunette beauty. Her face was round and sweet, eyes large, lips kissable.

Barnes felt things he hadn’t even remembered in decades. Even two years on the run, he’d never looked at a woman and wanted her. Even if it wouldn’t have been foolhardy and stupid; any woman who wanted him could have been a trap, a lure, and even if she wasn’t, Barnes wasn’t about the risk another life in case he went tripping off his programming.

No five-second pleasure was worth that.

He didn’t want to wake up laying on top of a dead woman and knowing he’d done it, even if he didn’t mean to.

No women.

But no desire for one, either.

Until this woman.

This perfect, angelic woman.

***

“Tell me about them,” Bucky said, desperate for a distraction. In his head, the fight at the airport. He didn’t-- he didn’t go Soldier, and he didn’t kill anyone, that was all he knew. It was a confusing twist of enhanced fighters.

Some kid -- a fucking kid! -- with strength that easily outmassed Bucky’s own, and probably the only reason they weren’t dead is that the other guys weren’t trying to kill. That, and the Spider-Kid was stupid. No experience. Lost his head in battle. Couldn’t stop making jokes and trying to bait people.

Steve dropped a truck on him, and that had shut him up.

Two guys in flying armor, some robot-guy with purple skin. The Widow, who turned traitor for Steve at the last minute.

The prince, who thought Bucky killed his father.

“What’s to tell?”

“They’re your team,” Bucky said. “Your friends.”

Steve smiled at that, dodging the implications that he’d turned on his own team. “Well, you know Sam and Nat, from before. Do you remember that, pal?”

“The asshole with the wings, yeah, I remember him,” Bucky said. And Widow, but he couldn’t talk about her. Steve… he didn’t need to know. How close, how damn close Bucky had been to ending it all, back-- when Widow was a child, and he’d trained her to become a murderer. How she’d grown up, and they’d worked together.

How he’d loved her.

He could barely remember it anymore. The actions, yes, he remembered what they’d done and what she’d said, and the way she smelled and moved in his arms. But he couldn’t remember the feelings. Those were all burned out of him, burned and seared by lightning as she watched and screamed and fought. And the next time he’d looked at her, he hadn’t known her.

“And then there’s Wanda,” Steve said, and Bucky dragged himself out of his head.

“That the red girl?”

She didn’t have red hair, not even glints of it in sunlight, but she was red, somehow. Red… her jacket was red, and that wouldn’t have mattered, either. It could have been green or blue or black. She still would have been red.

“Yeah, some people call her Scarlet Witch,” Steve said. “She’s… uh, she’s pretty freaky, when you first meet her.”

“Yeah?” Bucky pondered the question that he wanted to ask. There was something in Steve’s tone. “You making time with her, punk?”

“What? No, God, no. Wanda’s just a kid--”

Bucky snorted. “Yeah, to a hundred year old man, everyone’s a kid. She didn’t look like a kid to me, pal.” That was better. He didn’t want to be too interested in Steve’s girl. “Are you making time with anyone?”

“I’m a hundred years old, not dead,” Steve protested.

“That means no,” Bucky pointed out. “What about that girl, that… Sharon?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “She… I like her. She’s tough. Professional.”

“Does she kiss like a professional?”

Steve’s eyebrows did that thing, like a couple of trained caterpillars where he was trying to look all disapproving and not quite succeeding. “Don’t talk about her like that, she’ll kick your ass.”

Bucky decided not to mention that he’d already fought her, and smashed her through a table. On the other hand, that probably didn’t make things any easier, if Steve’s best pal was beating off the women. Literally.

“Tell me about the Scarlet Witch,” Bucky suggested, sitting back in his chair.

“People are scared of her,” Steve said. “She-- they did something to her. Hydra. Her and her twin brother. He was killed in action. She’s been real tore up about it.”

Bucky felt the servos in his arm clench and release. “What did they do to her?”

“We’re not sure,” Steve said. “Exposed her to some… thing. Cosmic radiation. It manifested in some pretty incredible power, but she doesn’t always have control over it. Works better for her when she’s angry, but then she--”

“She’s angry,” Bucky said. Anger could be a weapon, but a lot of times, it was just a distraction. A soldier had to be cool, calm. Had to focus his energy and power.

Anger. Clouded your judgement.

Fear. Clouded your judgement.

Bucky wasn’t afraid of her.

He was, however, afraid he might never see her again. He didn’t know what happened to Steve’s allies when they were left behind. Killed or captured.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “She can… telekinesis, mental manipulation. She can read your thoughts and your fears. People hate her for what she is. And Tony wanted to lock her up in a cage.”

_Safest place for someone like that. Someone like me._

_Lock us up in a cage._

Wanda. He wondered what her name would taste like on his tongue.

***

“You sure about this?” Steve chewed on his own tongue like there was more he wanted to say and didn’t.

“I can't trust my own mind. So, until they figure out how to get this stuff out of my head I think going back under is the best thing, …for everybody.”

That was true, it was so true. And it was also a lie. Going under was the best thing for James Buchanan Barnes. He couldn’t sleep. He only ate when someone put food in front of him. He lived and relived and relived everything.

Everything.

He just wanted it to stop.

Even if cryo hurt.

Even if he never woke up again.

“You’re gonna get them out, right?”

“Yeah, I have a plan,” Steve said.

“Man with a plan,” Bucky told him, ignoring everything in his head, the way it buzzed and shouted, the way every time he closed his eyes he saw Stark’s betrayed expression.

I wasn’t worth all this, Stevie. And once upon a time, you would have known that.

The way Steve looked at him as the cryochamber filled up with oblivion… no, Steve had never known that. Steve had always served his country. But his country… was Bucky. Nothing else was ever going to matter to him as much.

Bucky closed his eyes and let cryo carry him away.


	3. Chapter 3

_“Nice bit of acting work, Rumlow. I used to do some of that for the USO.”  
_ _“Where do you think I learned it, Captain? They showed us your old newsreels during our training.”  
_ _\-- Brock Rumlow & Steve Rogers, Marvel’s Captain America, the Winter Soldier Infinite Comic #1_

 

Cap’s bootheels rang out on the floor tiles as he strode out of the meeting with Prince -- soon to be King -- T’challa. There were details to be sorted out and plans to be made, and the Prince apparently didn’t have the time or the courtesy to deal with all of them. Just Cap. And Bucky, but he hadn’t gotten off the plane.

“Cap--”

“I told you, Scott, don’t call me that. Steve’s preferred. Rogers if you must. I-- I gave all that up.”

“Sorry, yeah, look-- we were wondering, what’s the plan?”

Steve looked around to see who _we_ consisted of, as if it could be anyone else. Sam and Wanda, Scott and Clint. The ones people were now calling the _renegades_. Wanted war criminals.

“Prince T’challa is working on-- he’s going to--” Steve stammered a few times before getting control of his expression and his voice. “He’s going to help Bucky. But that’s all he’s agreed to do. We’re… we’re on our own, out here.”

No money. Wanted by the governments of at least fifty different nations for supposed crimes against humanity, or whatever.

_What about the crimes against me?_

Illegally detained on the Raft for _weeks_ before Rogers had come for them. They’d done something -- something -- to her. Locked her in a collar and a damn straight jacket, and she couldn’t… her powers had been locked away. Like her whole being had been packed in cotton, and she’d gone right back to being normal.

And despite being as helpless as a kitten, wrapped up like that, wrapped away from her abilities, everyone still looked at her like she was some monstrous _thing_.

_I think you hurt Vision’s feelings, Wanda._

It was over between them, whatever bond had formed between the stone that granted her powers and the ones that had gifted Vision with life-- some sort of life. When he’d told her she couldn’t leave. Told her… told her what to do, like he had any right to control her.

She’d struck out at him, viciously. No one, no one, would ever tell her what to do again. She wasn’t a thing, she wasn’t a weapon, she was--

She was a prisoner.

Except now she wasn’t, and they all looked to Rogers for leadership.

Wanda shook her head and tried to pay attention.

After Rogers and Barnes had rescued them from the raft, Rogers had gone to Wakanda and had left his best friend behind. The one he’d fought for.

 _He fought for you, too,_ she told herself, and that was true. Stark had tried to lock her up in the compound, had in fact had her locked up in the Raft. Like she was some sort of monster.

_You are a monster._

She wanted to scream at the voices in her head, the ones that told her she was terrible, the ones that told her she was perfect. The ones that said she was a tool to be used, and the ones who told her she could rule the world if she wanted.

Why-- why would I want to rule the world.

“Wanda?”

She jerked her attention back to the room. It wasn’t much of a room, really, just a little building off a private landing strip that the Wakandans owned in a foreign country. She didn’t even know that she knew where they were.

“What, sorry, I’m-- I’m sorry, Clint, what?”

“Are you okay, kid?”

“No,” she said. “But… what’s the call?”

She trusted Clint. He’d been the first one to believe her, believe _in_ her, even though he had no reason to trust her, no reason at all.

“We don’t know, yet,” Clint said. “I’ve got a few safe houses, old stuff, from my SHIELD days, that I can check out, see if any of them are empty, or available. Once shit with Hydra went down--”

Wanda nodded. “I can help.” They knew that offer was more than just going around and peeking in a house. That was getting rid of any SHIELD or Hydra or even just squatters who’d taken up the building. Using her skills in a little more subtle manner than dropping cars on someone’s head, although that could be useful, too.

“Yeah, I was gonna ask you if you wanted to come with,” Clint said. “It’s good to have company.”

“You two are on recon, then, find us a place to hole up, money, supplies, good luck,” Rogers said. He offered Clint a hand, and then Wanda.

Just a brush won’t hurt, she told herself. She wanted to know, and it was obvious that Rogers didn’t want to talk about it. She pulled in her abilities, just a twitch of her fingers, a soft line of red mist that glittered in Rogers’ eyes for a moment.

She saw, saw the path to Wakanda, saw… Barnes, with his helplessly beautiful smile, clean and his hair hanging around his neck, those glorious blue eyes that looked sincerely up at Rogers. The most gorgeous man she’d ever seen. She couldn’t even have said why she was obsessed with him, except whenever she dreamed, she’d see him again, just moments, flashes.

The way he looked at her, when he didn’t look at anyone else.

The way he looked at her as if he couldn’t look at anyone else.

“I need to get some things,” Wanda said. “Nothing urgent. Just, you know--”

“Yeah, man, like a chocolate bar, man I could kill someone for a Twix,” Scott said. “I don’t know what these, dude, African chocolates are, but they’re just not right.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Wanda told him. She liked Scott. He… he was harmless. Not a threat to her. “I’ll be back soon.”

She left the little airstrip in one of the cars they’d acquired. Wanda didn’t ask where they’d gotten them from, or who they actually belonged to. She didn’t much care.

But she didn’t stay in the car; she drove it down the road until she found a place to park, out of sight -- and out of mind -- of the other Renegades.

Walked into the nearby field and called up her power. Red crackled around her. She concentrated, felt the exact spot on the planet where Rogers had been standing as he looked at his friend for the very last time.

And willed herself there.

***

“Do I even want to know how in Bast's name you got in here without being detected?”

The girl, and it was a girl, no more than sixteen, was pointing at her with some sort of shiny electric ring, glittery and throwing off little jolts of lightning.

“Magic,” Wanda said, both being sarcastic because that's what she did, and being serious because that's what she _was_. “I'm not a threat.”

“Yeah, sister, that's what they all say and suddenly you're speaking English in school and don't know where you came from.”

“You _are_ speaking English.”

“What can I say,” the girl said. “You work fast.”

“I came to see how Mr. Barnes is doing. Can I see him?”

“The American?” the girl said. “ He's on ice. Literally. No point in a visitor.” She hadn't lowered her weapon if that is what it was.

Wanda glanced around for someone in charge, or an adult who would be reasonable. Or even for witnesses if she decided to move the girl out of her way.

“Whatever you're hoping for,” the girl said, “you're not going to find it.”

“Maybe we started out on the wrong foot,” Wanda said. “I'm Wanda Maxi--”

“One of the rogue Avengers. My brother’s pet project,” she said. “I know who you are. We do have television in Africa. WiFi, too. Also, don't try it. There are psychokinetic signature detection units all over the palace. I knew you were here before you even materialized and I will not hesitate to have you killed if you twitch one pinkie finger.”

“Who are you?” Wanda stalled for time, trying to decide if she believed the girl or not. But if she hadn't known Wanda was coming, chances were she'd have been less calm. For the time being, Wanda was going to take it on faith.

And really, hadn't Wanda caused enough damage to Wakanda without meaning to.

“Princess Shuri,” she said. “But you can call me Doc, if you want.”

“That's an odd nickname.”

“I have three doctorate degrees,” Shuri said. “But Docs makes me sound like a word processing program.”

Wanda was startled into a laugh. “Docs, then. Can I see him? Can you tell me anything?”

“See him? Yes, but I’ll walk with you, if you don’t mind,” Shuri said. “As for telling you anything, no I cannot. Sergeant Barnes has not authorized me to share his medical condition with anyone, aside from Captain Rogers. And, as you will see, I can’t exactly ask him.”

Shuri led her through the place, which was more labs than hospital; or at least, there was a distinct lack of other patients. The whole place was full of glass and metal, plastics, and biological substances. There were screens displaying various prototype limbs, a synthetic heart, and other more obscure developments that Wanda couldn’t even make sense of.

“What is this place? I thought it was a hospital--”

“Wakanda Scientific Reserve,” Shuri said, proudly. “My home, if you will. I won’t ask how you got the information; you’ve never been here, but what little I know of your abilities, you probably raided the Captain’s brain for a reference.”

Wanda looked at her hands. “I don’t know very much about my abilities, either.”

“Seems dangerous,” Shuri pointed out.

Wanda was about to defend herself; she only used violence when pushed to it, she--

Stopped short, staring.

Barnes was in what looked like a glass and ceramic coffin, sleeping, tilted back at an angle, that perfect face in utter repose.

Wanda didn’t say anything, she couldn’t think or words, or an explanation, or anything. She just had to be as close to him as possible. Like a pin drawn to some impossibly strong magnet. She brushed her fingers over the glass, not even sure how she’d crossed the distance. Had she walked, or teleported?

It didn’t matter, because there he was, close enough to kiss.

Why she’d thought that, she didn’t know.

“Is he in pain?”

“Do I look like I’m torturing the man?” Shuri demanded, exasperated. “He’s in cryo. Sleeping. Perfect hibernation.”

“When will he be out?”

Shuri shrugged a shoulder. “He’s not in any hurry, and we have to make sure it’s safe. For him, as well as others.”

“The brainwashing,” Wanda murmured.

“I can see privacy’s not a thing for you,” Shuri said. “Look, do you actually want something, because I have work to do. Babysitting wasn’t on my schedule.”

“I’m not stopping you,” Wanda said, stroking the glass again, her fingertips only inches from Barnes’ chest. “I just want to stay here with him.”

Shuri considered her with flat disdain. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re not exactly exuding trust-vibes or anything. He’s only one broken white boy, but I did promise to fix him.”

Under her fingers, the glass vibrated, like the rumble of a distant train, or a washing machine in the next room. Startled, she glanced at Barnes, whose eyes were moving rapidly under his lids. His once-calm breathing was hurried, and even in cryo, he was sweating.

“Docs?”

“Move!” Shuri barked, moving to the device. She opened a holographic display over the chamber, poking at the glowing lights and moving things around with sure, deft fingers. “He’s not supposed to be dreaming in cryo. It’s a total body shutdown, otherwise he’d _age_.”

“What can I do,” Wanda asked, her fingers twitching with red vapors, wanting to do something--

“Get over here and catch him,” Shuri barked. She slapped a button on the side of the panel and a voice started speaking in calm, but urgent tones over her head, a language Wanda didn’t understand. “He’s crashing, this isn’t supposed to happen, what did you do?”

But she wasn’t stopping to accuse Wanda of anything, her fingers busy doing whatever she was doing to keep Barnes alive.

Wanda moved where Shuri indicated.

The door to the cryo unit came open with a hiss and a rush of cold air, and while Wanda had meant to catch him with her magic, to hold up his weight, to--

She let him fall into her arms.

Those blue eyes fluttered and opened and looked up at her like she was the only thing in the world that had ever, ever mattered.

Heat spread through her body where he grasped her, the way his cheek rested against her throat. Her heart beat harder, her lungs chased air fruitlessly.

Like a puzzle piece, meeting its mate, her life _clicked_.

Everything she’d been through, ever lose she’d ever suffered, each pain and joy, to bring her right to that moment.

“Oh,” she said, returning to her birth tongue as if she’d never spoken anything else. “It’s you.” As if she’d been reborn in that moment, everything was too-bright, and all she could see was his face, even when she closed her eyes against the light.

She could hear his heartbeat, registered by the monitors, but also she could feel it under her fingertips. Their breaths synced up, theirs hearts stuttered, and then beat, as one.

_Soulmate._

Mine.

 _Always_.

“Did I dream you up, darlin’?”

“I came,” she said, holding his one hand and pressing it to her heart, her own hand tented against his chest. Listening. Feeling. They were two lost spirits, reunited. “I came because you needed me.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s intense. There’s a memory I’ve been on the edges of… although to be honest, I’m not really sure how much is still missing. -- Bucky Barnes, The Winter Soldier Vol #1

Coming out of cryo was like drowning in reverse. He went from not needing to breathe, not even wanting to breathe, to hating the air, as it burned and seared into his lungs.

He’d been dreaming, and the part of him that wasn’t panicking knew that he wasn’t supposed to dream, he wasn’t supposed to anything in cryo, that was part and parcel of the whole gig. No dreams. No fear.

He fell into the arms of a woman, and her touch burned the ice away, cut through panic, and--

“Did I dream you up, darlin’?”

She was so damn beautiful, green, round eyes, a sweet face, a curtain of dark hair. Her mouth was as red as a berry, and her skin as pale and soft as snow.

“I came because you needed me,” she told him.

Bucky didn’t know that he’d needed her, not while he was in cryo, but maybe even there, he’d felt her, half the world, half a mile, half a step away. He might not have needed her before, but he needed her _now_.

_Soulmate._

_Mine._

He pulled back to look at her, the bonding effect where he’d touched her skin a subtle glow, almost not visible, just there like a mirage. He might not have seen it, but his hands and cheek and nose were tingling with it. Pins and needles, like his whole body was waking up for the very first time, and the way she rubbed at her throat let him know she was feeling it, too.

“Well, this is gonna throw my test data all to hell,” the princess said, crossing her arms over her chest and huffing at them. “And that doesn’t even begin to cover what a mess we’re in. You two couldn’t have waited, what, another month to bond? No, you have to go and do it now.”

“There’s a problem?” Bucky’s soulmate -- Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, _Wanda_ \-- asked. She didn’t take her eyes off Bucky, but he could see the flicker of worry in her expression.

“He’s still got trigger words and Hydra brainwashing going on,” Shuri said. “I wasn’t quite done with my programming.”

“Then you should put him back in the cryo--” that was the prince, the man who would be king, the man who had thought Bucky guilty of assassinating his father, until the very last minute.

“I can’t do that,” Shuri said. “What happens if you thaw a piece of meat and then throw it back in the freezer, nevermind, don’t answer that, I don’t know if you’ve ever cooked a thing in your whole life.”

“Oh, like you cook, little sister,” T’challa said.

“I don’t fly to the moon, either, but I know how,” Shuri said. “Listen, if I put him back in cryo right now, the chances of irreparable damage increases by almost seventy percent. And I’m good, brother, but I’m not a miracle worker.”

Bucky leaned his head forward until he was cradled in Wanda’s arms. Nothing really mattered anymore. He was with his soulmate and he let the simple balm of her presence soothe him.

“What does that mean?” Wanda asked.

“Maybe nothing,” Shuri said. “I was going to have to wake him before I ran my deprogramming program, it will take several sessions to lay the groundwork and the new program, and then, to be quite honest, I will reboot you. It’s very efficient.”

“Sure,” Bucky said. “Like a faulty computer.”

“It’s not your fault,” Wanda told him.

“Don’t make me any less broken,” Bucky said.

“In the meanwhile, I would stay away from Hydra agents,” Shuri said. “In case you were thinking of getting together to shoot the shit over old times.”

“Yeah, no.”

“I did not think so. Brother, if you could put some rooms aside for them, I’ll get back to work, as my program is needed a little more urgently.” She gave them a rather exasperated glance. “Don’t forget, if you prove a threat, we will not be so gentle, next time.”

“Don’t mind her,” T’challa said. “She is my younger sister, and it amuses her to threaten people. I think it comes from a difficult childhood.”

“Only because you made it that way,” Shuri said, flipping her brother off.

“Shall I report that you need more etiquette in your schooling?”

Bucky tuned out the bickering siblings. There was a fondness there, he could sometimes remember pieces of his sisters and brother, and the way they’d interacted. 

“This way, if you please,” T’challa said. “I will escort you personally. Miss Maximoff, are your whereabouts known?”

“Not-- as such?” Wanda admitted, squinching her face up. “I wasn’t entirely sure I was coming here until I arrived.” Bucky stood up, aware that he was wearing nothing more than white linen trousers and a thin tank, and none of that was going to disguise his body’s awareness of her proximity. Wanda laced her fingers with his, a point of contact that sent fire rippling through his body.

“Then perhaps you should find the means to contact the Captain. I do not wish him and his team of renegades to suppose that you are being held here,” T’challa said. “Enough damage has been done, already.”

There was a stiffness in T’challa’s back -- Bucky knew it well. He’d offered the help, because T’challa had believed the set up. But now, he was finding himself, like so many of the people who tried to help, in a lot deeper than he’d intended.

“Where’s Zemo?” Bucky wondered. He kept his hand in Wanda’s, his palm against hers, fingers twined together.

“He is in the prison, awaiting trial. Here--” T’challa threw open a door. “These will be your quarters for the duration of your stay. I will have someone stock your room with food, and I will not lock you in, you are guests, not prisoners. However, our country is undergoing some great changes, and it would not be wise for ones such as yourselves to be seen prowling about the palace. Please respect that, and stay within as much as possible.”

“Of course,” Bucky said. He knew a prison when he saw one, however. Nice as this was, and polite as T’challa had been, they were-- limited in their choices.

“And, you have my congratulations on your bonding,” T’challa said. “If nothing else, consider this-- a honeymoon.”

Wanda squeezed Bucky’s fingers.

Oh. 

_Oh._

“Thank you, your Majesty.”

***

Wanda had the oddest sense of coming home. 

She’d shared her life, her thoughts, her emotions, her needs, with Pietro.

And when he’d been taken from her, her entire world was torn in half. Or maybe it was just her, torn in half. She’d been like a shadow of herself. A shadow that listened, more and more, to the voice of her power.

And now…

Now there was too much.

A soulmate.

She’d never really expected to have one. Most people didn’t; it wasn’t so rare as to be unheard of, but neither was it common. Certainly, nothing like the numbers story books and romance movies would have one believe. Wanda had known plenty of people in her life who believed their soulmate was out there, who refused to commit to love in the now, for some imaginary person they would probably never meet.

Based on the sheer number of people on the planet, assuming that you even lived at the same time that your soulmate, the chances were pretty good that most people’s soulmates were teenage boys from Asia.

But here Bucky was, stretching years and countries, ignoring philosophy and practically disproving science, against all odds.

Her soulmate.

No wonder it had been so easy to cast Vision off, to hurt him.

She regretted that, now. That she’d hurt Vision. She’d never really meant to hurt him, but he’d tried to stop her, tried to control her, and Wanda had enough of being controlled. She would rather do the _wrong thing_ than what she was _told_ to do, expected to do.

It didn’t matter who was doing the telling; not Tony Stark, not the UN, not SHIELD or Hydra or the Avengers or the Wakandans. No one was ever going to tell her what to do again.

But all that rage, all that uncertainty, it melted away at Bucky’s touch, and it was…

She’d never felt so content in her entire life. Not even when her parents were alive, and they were in Sokovia. Even then, there was hunger and fear and doubt. Even then, there was loss.

Here… with him… was everything.

She knew, logically, it couldn’t last. There would be bad times, hunger, fear. But right now, everything was all right.

“So, has bondin’ changed much, since my day?” Bucky asked her. He probably didn’t need to pull her into the bedroom of the suite to ask her that, but he did. And Wanda was completely aware of the bed, the central focus of the room. The bonding, which would be the central focus of her _life_.

Everything from now on would be about him; and the only reason that it was all right is because she was everything for him. From now on.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “You’re American.”

“Some days,” Bucky said. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at her, smiling that sweet smile, the one she’d only seen a few times before, and usually directed at the Captain.

“I thought--” she hesitated, then voiced it. “I thought you might be Steve’s--”

“Yeah, doll, lotta people did,” Bucky said. “Our folks did, the Army did, hell, even Hydra did. They did their damn best to burn him outta my mind for good. Never took. But-- it ain’t never been like this before.”

“What is it like,” Wanda asked. “For me, I have a twin brother, many years. We did everything together, we were everything to each other. He died, and losing him cut a hole in my chest, that I could never fill. Until now.”

“I would die for you,” Bucky said. “Right now, on the spot. But dyin’ is easy. I would… for you. Live.”

A bucket of ice water went right through Wanda’s chest; she could lose him. He could die, be killed, anything--

“Hey, don’t go thinkin’ on endings,” Bucky said. “We got now, and that’s more than I ever hoped to have.”

Her hands were shaking, but she reached for him, wanting that moment, that now, that forever. 

And he met her halfway, surging off the bed to catch her mouth in a fierce kiss, promising everything. His hand came around the back of her neck, cradling her skull like it was precious glass, and he kissed her.

She’d been kissed before, by boys in Sokovia, by men in Hydra, and most recently, by a man who was no man at all, but a construct of magic and machine.

Nothing had prepared her for a kiss like this one.

His lips were soft, plush, mobile, and his tongue was cunning, sliding into her mouth and tempting her to meet and match him. She could taste his breath and feel his heart pounding under her fingertips. 

He was utterly, utterly perfect.

She found herself pushing at the simple cotton tank he was wearing, wanting to get her fingers on that rich, warm skin. It was awkward -- Vision could just melt away clothes if he didn’t feel like wearing them, and everyone else she’d ever been with had both arms. But he helped her as much as he could, despite being reluctant to take his hand off her, to take his mouth off hers, to stop kissing her. And she didn’t want him to, either.

Her hands were in his hair, playing with the long strands, her thumbs rubbed just behind his ears, and he was urging her backward, onto the bed, and when she fell on it, he was there, cradled between the vee of her legs.

“Love you, doll,” he said. “Love you so much.”

“I know. I-- I can feel it.”

Bucky pushed up to stare down at her, his smile satisfied and predatory and utterly sexy. “Not yet, but you will.”

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _But everyone's story begins once upon a time...and it's up to us to cherish the time we're given to ensure we live happily ever after._
> 
> \--Wanda Maximoff (Earth-616)

 

He would absolutely be lying if he’d said he barely remembered the last time he laid down with a woman and expected satisfaction. Even his dim and barely-there memories of his dusty past, when he was trying so hard to prove everything and nothing at the same time, when he’d find a dame, or sometimes two, to dance with, to take home and kiss in a corner, to tempt and tease until they were both willing and eager to find a bed. 

Bucky’d been a lady’s man back in the day, all cool charm and warm kisses. 

Even as the Winter Soldier, he’d taken a lover -- Natasha, from the Red Room, had been there for him during some of the worst times in his life. They’d joked, once, that if either of them had a soul, they’d have been mates.

But it wasn’t like that, not here, not now.

It was like the first time, in that he was terrified of screwing up, and yet it was the best fear ever, the fear that made things more intense.

He felt new and green, trembling inside and eager.

It wasn’t a test.

“Wanda,” he said. The way her name just rolled right off his tongue and spilled sweet into the air between them.

She brushed her fingers across his cheek, tracing the bone, and he turned his mouth into her palm, kissing her hand.

Somehow, they ended up on the bed in a tangle of bodies, his thigh between her legs, feeling the heat. Her hand on his chest, in his hair. Clothes were pushed aside, frantically shed, until they were laying there, next to each other, nothing between them but air.

And secrets. So much he’d need to tell her; not that he feared she’d reject him for his past, because she couldn’t. Even the same way he could never reject her, no matter what. They were bound together, formed only for each other. But so she’d know.

And so he would know. Who she was, at the very core of her.

“Yours,” she said, kissing him. “I’m yours.”

It wasn’t going to be slow, Bucky knew that even as she rolled on top of him, her hair forming a curtain around her face, the ends teasing and tickling at his bare chest. Just feeling her heat was pushing him toward the edge. But it would be thorough and undeniable, and in the end, she was his, and he was hers.

He reached up to cup one perfect, rounded breast, the soft, heavy weight of it exactly perfect in his hand. Her nipple tensed at the touch, contracted against his skin, until it formed a peak, exactly the right size for his mouth. Everything about her was perfect, and he marveled at it, even as he pushed up to lick at that pebbled skin, to suckle and tease and listen to the soft, needy noises that she made.

“Tell me you love me,” Bucky urged her, and she thrust her chest forward, pushing her breasts at him, and he teased her, one with deft fingers and the other with a clever tongue until she was clinging to his head, hands deep in his hair, holding him as if to make sure he never stopped.

“I love you,” she said, and it was a choking, emotional admittance, not reluctant, but so full of feeling, as if she wasn’t sure she could get something that large and that desperately important, out.

He scooted them up and all the way on to the bed -- it was huge, there was so much room, not some crooked little cot in which every movement threatened to spill them to the floor -- and she sprawled there over his legs, her thighs spread wide, exposing herself and her secrets to his wondering eyes.

He touched her, and she almost screamed, her voice high and reedy. “Oh, please!”

And he did it again, working her with his fingers. Her folds were hot, wet with her need, and as he fingered her clit, working that little nub back and forth, he felt another gush of dampness in his palm.

He could smell her, sharp and salty, tangy with her juices. Hear every pant of breath, every beat of her heart, the way her blood rushed in her veins. 

“God, love touchin’ you, doll,” Bucky said, hand still exploring her body. Never had he longed for his missing hand more, than the fact that he was limited to just one hand, his mouth and tongue. “Love discoverin’ you, what makes you moan and wriggle like that. Love searchin’ you.”

“Well, then find it already,” Wanda blurted and then she went pink with embarrassment, biting her lip as if she’d done something terrible.

Bucky just laughed, and kept on moving his hand over her. 

“We’ll get there, together,” Bucky promised. He knew where she wanted him, could almost see it traced on her body, exactly where to touch, how fast to rub, and he teased her mercilessly until she grabbed his hand like he was some green switch of a boy.

“Aw, there, is that where it feels just right?”

And then he was touching her just right, moving his thumb over her, circling, and she arched back with a fervid cry, as if he knew her body better than she did. One of his fingers slid inside her, thrusting up and in as his thumb circled and she clamped down on him, squeezing with those sweet, inner muscles.

“Wait for me,” he told her and she actually stopped moving to glare at him.

“Hurry up,” she told him, and she moved, lifting up and he almost didn’t get his hand moved in time before she impaled herself on his cock.

“Little witch,” Bucky teased, and she rocked on him, grinding down, her thighs squeezing against his hips. She leaned down and kissed him, a soul-shattering, aching kiss. He matched her pace, stretching and filling her, feeling her squeeze around him, and it was too much, and he--

“Wanda!”

Their voices rose together in a tangle, uneven cacophony of pleasure, and he rocked them together, again and again, thrusting into her, giving it to her, as she begged and whimpered and he couldn’t breathe, and they couldn’t stop… until they crested the peake together, and then tumbled off the side.

“You,” she said, snuggling against him while he tried to find his breath, his wits, his sense, “have the most beautiful O-face I have ever seen.”

And then he was laughing, because she was ridiculous and adorable and perfect, and he was laughing because he was in love and then he was laughing because she was laughing and playfully swatting him with tiny fists.

“I love you.”

***

They had to stay not only in the compound, but in the private set of rooms put aside for guests. They were, to be sure, quite a large set of rooms, more than Wanda had ever had for her very own -- even in Tony Stark’s elaborate compound, she hadn’t had more than an apartment’s worth of rooms. Although the compound did have a lot of features and amenities.

That said, a cage was still a cage.

The first time Bucky caught her gazing out the window resentfully -- the windows were reflective, she could see out but no one could see in -- he’d teased her.

“It’s better accommodations than Hydra,” he said. 

“I know,” she told him. And then she had to tell him how she knew it. 

“We didn’t know,” she confessed, but that was partly a lie. “Or we knew, but we didn’t allow ourselves to know. I was so _angry--_ ”

“That thing in your head, the stone from Loki’s staff,” Bucky said. “That was makin’ you crazy. Everything I heard, it was makin’ everyone crazy. It gave you your powers. And you were drawn to it, imprisoned by it. Chains you can’t see, doll, they’re still chains.”

“And what about now? The mind stone is still here,” she told him. “Vision has it, and he’s Tony Stark’s creature.” It was part of Vision, like a heartbeat, like a faint but noticeable _awareness,_ alien and infinitely patient.

She didn’t know what it was, aside from what Thor and Vision had said; one of the infinity stones, the stones of power, beginning the universe, formed of the stuff of the cosmos.

Wanda didn’t know what that meant for someone who was only human-- or who had once been human and wasn’t, quite, anymore. She was made by a force, a power she could only barely understand.

And yet, inside, she was still the same angry girl, the same girl bent on making her pain felt to the person who had caused it. 

She didn’t feel different, even if she was.

She’d tried to tell Vision that, but he wasn’t listening.

No one listened.

They feared her, but they didn’t _listen_.

Maybe it was because they feared her that they didn’t listen; accepting that she was what she was, it made her the _enemy_.

“Humans are dumb, sweetheart,” Bucky said, and Wanda wasn’t sure that she’d said any of that outloud. “Soulmate link. I picked up about half that. We’ll get better at it, as time goes by. Learning how t’ talk direct to each other, or hide our thoughts.”

“I don’t need to hide my thoughts from you,” Wanda told him.

“I might need to, though,” Bucky said. “You know my brain ain’t entirely my own playground anymore. I don’t want you t’ have to deal with that.”

“We’re supposed to be in this together,” Wanda told him. “Sharing everything. That means that the bad stuff, too. I can help you.”

“How do you figure?” 

Wanda could feel the doubt around the edges of his thoughts -- his words were so different from hers that she couldn’t quite tell what he was thinking -- and a fey, wild sort of hope.

“I know you’re worried about your command words,” Wanda said. “It’s possible I might be able to dig them out. And if not, I can certainly contain you, if something happens. Does it wear off? I mean, what do you know about it?”

“The words--” Bucky said slowly, and she could hear them in her mind, the way the man who had not been a psychiatrist had said them. He’d been just like her. Zemo. Desperately wanting revenge for life’s cruelty. He blamed all the Avengers for the actions of Ultron. 

For the actions-- of what had once been her own fault.

And Zemo had done his damned best to bring the Avengers down. 

_Succeeded_ , really. There were no Avengers anymore; just Tony Stark and a few hangers on. Vision, who would never abandon his maker, his master, his… father. War Machine, who was badly hurt, and might never recover. The child, Spider-Man. Not really enough to form a fighting team. Although Wanda knew Stark had pulled a few missions on his own.

She wasn’t sure it mattered. Surely the world wouldn’t produce another threat like Ultron. Maybe, she thought, they could agree that the world had already learned that lesson.

“The words frame compliance,” Bucky said. “I will comply. They-- I can’t fight it, once the words are spoken, I’m… theirs. I belong to them. I don’t even reckon you could stop that.”

“When do they stop holding you?” she asked. Because he had broken free, before.

“Sometimes it’s the shock of it-- seeing Steve started that. Understanding that I was someone else, that I have always been someone else. Zemo-- he wanted me to break free, so he let me go, after I broke out of the compound, hurt people. He told me where to go, to secure myself, and then-- I would be myself again. It _sucks--_ ” He clenched his fist, hard, jaw gritting. “He let me go. I have to be _let go,_ like a damn dog.”

_No agency_ , Wanda thought. Like she was; at the mercy of forces she didn’t understand, treated like a thing, a weapon, without a mind of her own.

“I can hold you,” she told him. “I’m sure of it. If we need to--” She was strong, she was that strong. She’d been practicing, even after the disaster in Laos, to refine her abilities. To know what she could do. To conserve her strength so when something went wrong, she could continue to hold on.

Pushing Vision away from her seemed to have allowed her more freedom, her strength was even greater, now that she wasn’t bound to and bonded with, the thing that made her, and that kept her a prisoner inside her own head.

That was what they didn’t understand; it was never about the _walls_.

_I can’t control their fear, only my own._

“I’m not afraid of you,” Bucky told her. And it was the same as if he’d told her that he loved her. That he _trusted_ her.

It was, in fact, all she needed.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“What ? No breath for smartass remarks? Pity. I’m new to this — I haven’t begun to get my fill of super hero banter.”_  
>  \-- Shuri, Black Panther Comics

Wakanda, from what Bucky could see of it, was nice. Admittedly, they only had two different views, out some very narrow windows. But it looked nice. Unspoiled. 

Bucky would say, at least, in the last thirty years, New York had cleaned up a bit. He could recall a little of the seventies -- he’d had a job there, and for whatever reason, the haze around the city had stood out to him, the way it looked like an evil fog. Now, the view was clearer, most of the places in the world.

But New York didn’t feel like home. Bucky wasn’t sure he would ever have a home again.

In the meanwhile, Wakanda was nice. Peaceful.

Or, at least it had been.

“There’s somethin’ going on in the city,” Bucky murmured, watching troops move -- the all-women army of Wakanda, the Dora Milaje, were lining up with their spears and their throwing rings.

Wanda came to his side to look, but shrugged. T’challa had been kind, but also distant. He had a country to run, leadership to transfer. It wasn’t surprising that he had no time for them, but they didn’t know anyone else, and they weren’t supposed to leave their rooms anyway.

Bucky might have done so a few times anyway, just to get a feel for the land. Each time, he’d been gone no more than ten minutes when two of the Dora Milaje would show up and flank him. They had never threatened him, nor insisted that he return to his rooms. In fact, they hadn’t said anything at all. Bucky hadn’t known if it was because they didn’t speak English, or because the troop had taken some sort of vow of silence. They had refused to answer in any of the other languages Bucky knew, either.

They hadn’t made him return to his rooms, but they had accompanied him through his entire wandering. Bucky had pushed that, one time, just to see what they’d do. The longer he had stayed away from his rooms, the more of them had shown up, in partnered pairings, to watch and to silently disapprove.

He couldn’t discover much at the head of his own personal parade, so he had given up after a while. But he did learn enough of the palace layout in that particular set of escapades to know that something was going on in the throne room. He was both intensely curious -- it seemed a part of his nature that he’d forgotten until recently -- and personally unconcerned. The Wakandan people didn’t want his help, and he doubted there was much he could offer them anyway.

A brief tone chimed in the room, and before Bucky could do anything more than crouch defensively, Princess Shuri came in, carrying a case. “Oh, good. You are here,” she said. Like they’d be anyplace else. “Miss Wanda, one’s brother would like to extend his compliments on your good behavior, and wonders if you can, as he says, get yourselves gone?”

“He’s kicking us out?” Wanda was toweling her hair; Bucky would swear that she lived half her life in the bath. Or maybe it was just the one in Wakanda was particularly nice. Or the heat was making her want to wash up frequently. Bucky didn’t know, he just took advantage of his soulmate walking around naked a lot.

“We have… difficulties of our own,” Shuri said. “Ones that, should outsiders be found in the Palace, might be trouble to explain. It would be best, for us, and for you, if you’re not here. As soon as possible.”

“I can ‘port out,” Wanda said. “As long as your monitors are down.”

“They can be,” Shuri said. She gestured to the case. “I had wanted to do the installation myself, but I have included a list of such persons who might be able to assist, as well as instructions. It is my gift to you.” 

Bucky eyed the case dubiously. “An arm?”

“Yes, Sergeant Barnes,” she said, smiling pertly. “But we have no time for it now. Take this, and these. Pack your things. The monitors will go down in ten minutes. It would be best if you didn’t linger.”

“What’s happening?” Wanda asked, reaching out as if to touch Shuri’s arm.

“Nothing that concerns you colonizers,” Shuri said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. We will see. A cousin has come home, long lost and unknown to us. You will go. I will send someone to you, if it is safe for you to return, and if you are still welcome and willing.”

“Thank you,” Bucky said. He didn’t open the case, didn’t want to look at it. Not yet. There were so many things that he might find if he did that, and they didn’t have time for any of it. “For everything.”

“You are welcome. I must go.”

Shuri ran off, her shoes making no sounds on the floor as she went. That was a neat trick and Bucky wondered if he would ever learn it. There was a limit to how quiet he could be.

“Where do you want to go, my love?” Wanda asked him. She was throwing their things in a bag. There weren’t that many things, not really. Wakanda hadn’t exactly been set up for a couple of light skinned folk to do any shopping. Even if they had money.

Which they didn’t. Probably needed to fix that, soonish.

“I know a safe house, like a really safe house. If we can get anywhere near Odesa, in the Ukraine,” Bucky said. 

“I can get us to what is left of Sokovia,” Wanda said. “There very little there. We will be just more scavengers and dispossessed. There is a Hydra holding facility there, or was. There may be supplies there.”

Bucky shuddered. “Yeah, doll, that sounds good. Well, not good, but defensible.” And if there were people, they might be people that he wouldn’t mind killing.

“And I should contact the others,” Wanda said. “I do not think they know where I went. Steve may be tearing up Eastern Europe, looking for me. But they would not have remained where they were, once I went missing.”

“Yeah, he’s like that. Worry wart,” Bucky said. “All right, you ready? Got your toothbrush?”

“If Steve is a worry wart, he learned it from an expert,” Wanda scoffed, but she went into the bathroom and gathered up their toiletries, anyway. It was the little luxuries, sometimes, that mattered. You never knew how much a hairbrush was worth, until you didn’t have one, and you were crouched in an alley in Kosovo, cutting pine pitch out of your hair with a combat blade.

Bucky shook away the memory; he didn’t even know when that was, there was no context around it. Some day, he thought, it’d be nice to have a thought that wasn’t completely random and useless.

Wanda held up her hands, fingertips already seething swirls of reddish smoke. 

Bucky slung the bag onto his shoulder and grabbed the case that contained the arm. “Ready when--”

He didn’t even finish the sentence before a new place dissolved around them.

“--you are.”

***

Sokovia was a wasteland. Like someone had picked it out to film some post-apocalyptic horror movie and just left the scenery the way it was. Wanda couldn’t even tell where she was.

It could have been worse, although she didn’t want to admit it. The Avengers had made hasty plans and evacuated as many people as they could. The ground wasn’t littered with bodies. 

But there were a few. People Ultron had killed, people who’d been killed by collateral damage.

Wanda knew a lot about collateral damage.

“This way,” she said. She didn’t know for sure that it was this way, she had no idea where in the city she’d teleported them to, but the city was narrowest on its east to west border, and that way was decidedly west. Maybe once they were out of the worst of the destruction zone, they’d be able to find a phone. Wanda had a few numbers memorized that were burner phones that the renegade Avengers kept on them. Supposedly untraceable, but she knew Stark.

If he hadn’t found them yet, it’s because he wasn’t actually looking. He didn’t want to find them. 

_Bet you didn’t see that coming…_

She told herself she wasn’t crying. She’d lost half her life here, her twin, her best friend. He’d been all she had, and Clint, Steve, and the rest, they’d barely filled the gap.

“He died here,” Bucky said, softly, standing on a small hill of rubble to try to get a better view.

“Yes,” she said. “He died, saving Clint Barton and some children. He took bullets meant for them. He did not have to die, he should not have died. It was not fair.”

“No, it’s not,” Bucky said. “Good people die and they leave us behind to grieve for them. It’s not fair, and sometimes it seems like evil is rewarded and good only suffers. It’s not fair. And you’re angry and sad about it, and it seems like no one’s listenin’. But I am. You tell me about him, while we walk.”

“I don’t know what I can tell you,” Wanda said. “He was my brother, and he was an idiot. And he was brave and stupid and funny. He fought when he should have talked, talked when he should have listened, and fucked when he should have walked away. And I loved him. He was beautiful and he was all that I had.”

“Sounds like another dumbass I know,” Bucky said. “Save for the fuckin’ part. Steve might still be a virgin yet.”

Wanda chuckled at that. “No, no he is not.”

“You’ll note that I ain’t askin’ how you know that,” Bucky said. 

Wanda told him about Pietro, and the terrible jokes that he used to make, which detoured into giving Bucky a basic grounding in Sokovian. He was quick with the language, and was soon parroting the words back at her, accent only the faintest touch. It was both soothing and upsetting to hear the words of her people, spoken to her by this outsider, in the ruins where there had once been a city she loved.

But she would speak Sokovian to him, and she would listen to him speak to her. There were not so many Sokovians left, and after the wasteland that Ultron had made of her home, they were scattered in small tribes of refugees, being shoved on from almost every country in the world, accepted and wanted nowhere.

“There’s been scavengers,” Bucky reported, looking at -- well, Wanda didn’t even know what he was looking at, what he was seeing, but he was the Winter Soldier and she trusted him. If he was seeing evidence of people in the city, it was likely there. “They went this way, might be a base or a camp, or a village.”

“How--”

“They took children’s clothing, among other things. They’re probably not going to be openly hostile, and if we bring more supplies, they might be helpful.”

Between Bucky’s strength and skill, and Wanda’s powers, they were able to crack into a previously buried shop. There were several broken racks of canned goods, and, probably more importantly, a dozen flats of unbreached water bottles. Bucky constructed a makeshift cart from a broken bicycle and a plastic storage bin. Even one handed, her man was a wonder.

Wanda tried to tamp down on some weird sense of pride. His skills were what Hydra had taught him. At the same time, he was taking care to bring food and water to people who needed it, and that was… well, practical, and yet _caring_. Wanda could have flown them out of the city, but neither of them suggested it.

_I cannot control their fear, only my own._

With Bucky leading the way, they rolled down a road that someone -- or several someones -- had spent time clearing. There were people here. Her people. She didn’t know if she was petrified or eager to see them. And because she couldn’t decide, she stayed at Bucky’s side, her fingers sometimes darting out like they had a will of their own, to touch his hand, or his shoulder, or once to pull a lock of hair that had gotten stuck to his face.

Another turn, and Bucky’s stance changed. “ _They see us_ ,” and she blinked, realizing that he’d spoken to her in Sokovian. 

“ _Hello!_ ” She waved, not quite knowing where they were, and then opening her mind and her magic, and picking them out like she had infrared vision. “ _Hello, come out, please. We have food and water. We don’t mean any harm._ ”

“Wanda,” someone said, and then Natasha Romanoff was climbing out of a broken out window. “You’re here, we weren’t sure where-- _James_?”

“Hey,” Bucky said. “Tasha, it’s good to see you.”

“Somehow, I think you have a lot of explaining to do,” Natasha said. “Come on, back to the camp.”

“Are you helping--”

Wanda waved a hand at the Sokovians, a few dozen refugees who came out, all carrying makeshift weapons, and yet, they were smiling.

“Steve kinda insisted,” Natasha said. “We were hoping you’d come home, after you disappeared. Sam was so frantic, he thought about asking Stark what happened to you. We didn’t know if Ross had picked you up or what.”

“No, I… look, I’ll explain it, but there’s trouble in Wakanda, and I had to get Bucky out,” Wanda said, which wasn’t entirely true, but it was sort of true, and it would do for a summary.

Bucky twined his hand with Wanda’s fingers, gave her a squeeze. “We’ve supplies for the refugees, what we could scrounge. The clear road, that’s gotta be Steve. He likes to show off, big muscles that came out of a bottle.”

“Yeah, come on, this way, we’ve got some real shelter set up,” Natasha said. 

Feeling like she’d finally come home, really home, she held Bucky’s hand while some of the refugees came to take the makeshift wagon, chattering in Sokovian, and as they walked, it seemed like Bucky’s fluency was getting better by the second. He was practically a native speaker, by the time they got to camp.

Steve Rogers met them at the gate, and when he saw Wanda and Bucky, his beautiful face lit up like sunrise.

“Welcome home,” Steve said.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to post like 10 days ago and got skipped for whatever reason -- it's been a crazy summer!  
> Anyway, I'll go ahead and post the next chapter in a week or so, as originally scheduled, so we'll get caught up!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Ma’am, we’re super heroes. Of course we know what’s going on here.” -- Sam Wilson

“What the hell is this, Barnes?” Sam demanded, staring at the case with the disembodied arm in it, and the three beads on a stretchy black cable.

“My arm,” Bucky said, sitting at the table, that bored, haven’t-I-seen-it-all expression on his face. Wanda couldn’t stop looking at him even if she wanted to, and she didn’t want to. He was perfect and he was beautiful, and he was _hers_. Somehow, after everything that had happened, after everything she’d done, everything that had been done to her, she’d gotten something real, something pure and perfect.

“I can see that,” Sam said, eyebrow quirking on his forehead. “Kinda all Dr. Frankenstein of you to be carrying it around.”

“Can’t put it on myself,” Bucky said. “And Princess Shuri didn’t have time.”

“What is going on in Wakanda?”

“Internal matter,” Wanda said. “Docs didn’t seem inclined to share, perhaps especially not with me.” As Wanda was accidentally -- and only partially -- to blame for the death of about a dozen Wakandas. Wanda split her time between considering it entirely her fault and considering it not her fault at all. If she hadn’t lifted Crossbones into the air and lost control, they wouldn’t have died. On the other hand, Crossbones was going to blow himself to hell and let loose a biological weapon that would have killed everyone in the marketplace, and probably including the Wakandans. 

“Hey, doll,” Bucky said, reaching out and brushing his fingers light over the back of her hand. “It’s not your fault.” Picking up on her thoughts, or the tenor of them, through the soulmate link. They’d get better at it, as time went on, being able to share thoughts or words across impossible distances. 

If someone had asked her about soulmating five years ago, she wouldn’t have wanted one. To share herself so intimately, to know everything about someone else, no matter how horrible? She’d shared that with Pietro and losing it had almost broken her.

She wasn’t sure she could do it again, and she hadn’t been given a choice, now. She met Bucky’s clear blue gaze. But she wouldn’t trade it, not for anything. She loved him. _I love you._

_I know._ She actually heard his voice in her mind, like nothing she’d ever experienced before.

“So, what are we supposed to do with it?” Clint asked. “Ain’t like I keep a mechanic in my back pocket, and I’m pretty sure Stark’s not going to take housecalls.”

“The Princess and Stark aren’t the only engineers on the planet,” Nat said. She was flicking through the beads on the little dangle, which spat out light screens. “There’s directions here, we’ll put you together like you’re an Ikea dresser.”

“Oh man, I hope not,” Sam said. “Those things are like, impossible. I have spent more time than I want to admit, surrounded by pieces, parts, allen wrenches, and terrible directions, sobbing like a baby.”

“I would pay to see that, Wilson,” Clint said.

“Let me do some digging before we have to put James back in the freezer because his hand is upside down,” Nat said. “I’m pretty sure there’re a few engineers here in Europe who can help us.”

“Don’t bring any Hydra back,” Bucky said, which he probably didn’t have to say, but you never knew. Hydra kept popping up all over the place.

“Hydra might be easier,” Nat suggested. “We bring them in, they fix the arm, we let Steve punch them in the face for a while. Beats paying for it.”

“Ha ha, Nat, no,” Steve said. “I’ll go with you, in case you need backup.”

“I’m a spy, Steve,” Nat said. “I do a better job when you’re not waving your red, white, and blue grudge around.”

“That’s not what you said when we hit Fort Meade to liberate the EXO-7.”

Scott Lang, who no one knew particularly well, looked up from where he was studying the instructions Shuri had left with the arm. “I can do this,” he said.

Everyone turned to stare at him. 

“What? I’ve got a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and these are step by step, simple directions. Hell, my kid could put this together, and she’s six,” Lang said, and then his face fell as he remembered that he couldn’t actually get his child to do anything, since he probably wasn’t going to see her for a while. “We don’t even need him to be knocked out, the biofeedback doesn’t kick in until the last steps. You won’t even feel a thing.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow and directed an inquiring look at Steve. _Do you trust this guy?_

“Tic Tac is pretty okay in my book,” Sam said, answering the question. He was the only one who had much of anything on Lang, outside of the battle in Germany. And whatever they’d done here in Sokovia together. “He talks stupid, acts smart.”

“If you trust him,” Steve said, “then I trust him.”

“If Steve trusts you, then I trust you,” Bucky said. “Not like I ever had people workin’ on my arm who I had a choice about, before.”

“Musical chairs trust circle, are we all going to sing songs, now?” Scott wondered, that dopey grin on his face.

“No,” Bucky said.

Wanda got a brief glimpse, a few maintenance routines, and Bucky in agony, but holding still because he would be punished if he hurt another technician.

“I’ll be here, too, the whole time,” Wanda said.

“Thanks,” Bucky told her, and he gave a tentative little smile.

“So-- what is all this about?” Clint wondered. “I mean, I don’t usually pick up on shit, but you two are gettin’ lost in each other’s eyes. I thought--”

“I touched him,” Wanda said. “I touched him and the entire world changed.”

“Oh,” Steve said. “Huh, how ‘bout that?”

“Fate gave me a gift,” Wanda said.

“Fuck that, doll,” Bucky said. “You an’ I? We were fuckin’ _owed_.”

***

_It was cold, and there was too much light. Every time he tried to figure out what was going on, he opened his eyes to searing agony. There wasn’t much less agony when his eyes were closed. Something was wrong with his arm._

_It was cold. He tried to remember what had happened, how he’d gotten here, what he was doing, and there would be a brief whirl, a sensation of falling, the train, the train, someone was shooting at them--_

_Steve!_

_Steve was going to die trying to save him, but no, he fell alone, and--_

_\--one memory elided with another--_

_“Good morning, Mr. Barnes, so nice to see you again,” Zola said, bending over him and touching him with cold hands. “An astonishing feat, surviving the fall. Incredible, simply incredible. And so many years in statis, while I labored with the Americans, pretending to be one of them. Nonsense. You will be the new Fist of Hydra.”_

_He knew he shouldn’t respond to that, give them anything to work with. But he knew Steve would come, Steve would never--_

_“Oh, you hope your friend will come to rescue you, but Mr. Barnes, no one knew there was anything to rescue. And I’m afraid that Captain America… well, he has been dead many years now.”_

_He didn’t cry._

_But the wall in him that had held -- perhaps not as pure or shining as Steve’s wall -- cracked. Zola found a way in._

_A red book, a leather covered book._

_“We have ways…” Zola said._

_Of course they did._

_It was cold…_

***

Bucky woke up, actually overheated, a warm body curled against his chest. 

Years of training prevented him from exploding out from under the blankets, from screaming, from doing more than simply going from being asleep and dreaming to being awake. He didn’t even move his eyelids at first, to see the real world around him. He didn’t need to. His sense of smell told him everything he needed to know.

He was safe. 

Relatively, at least. 

The refugee camp in Sokovia was mostly quiet. A dog barked in the distance and was rapidly shushed by its owner. There were a few murmurs from around the campfires, the watch talking while they pretended that they were standing guard.

A baby cried.

Homey, really.

Except he knew it wasn’t. Every day they stayed there was like a thorn in Wanda’s chest, a single catch of breath, a longing look down a ruined street, wishing to remember it as it was.

She needed to leave, or they needed to start rebuilding. Either way, she didn’t need to be here, among the ruins of her childhood home.

Bucky didn’t know how he’d feel, if Brooklyn was rubble, like this. On the other hand, he’d been to Brooklyn recently, and if it wasn’t ruined, it was at least still mostly unrecognizable.

He cast his mind back to the dream, and then-- “Shit.”

Wanda stirred and then woke, her eyes glowing faintly red in the darkness. “What?”

“Bad dream,” Bucky said. “But that’s not all. I remembered--”

Wanda struggled to sit up, the blanket sliding down around her waist, her breasts soft and pretty, a reminder that before sleep and the nightmare, there had been love, and that had been good. “Something important?”

Bucky shifted, let his hand rest on her thigh. “There’s another book out there,” he said. “At least one. Who knows how many.”

“Book?” she said, and a kaleidoscope of images whirled through his mind, the most recent of Zemo, reading the words carefully from the little pages. A flash of the first time he’d ever heard the worlds-- “Nevermind, I think I just got the download.”

“We can’t afford to have those words just, out there,” Bucky explained. “Anyone-- Hydra could--”

“There is no Hydra,” Wanda said. “Not anymore.”

“Yeah, you know, people keep sayin’ that, and it keeps not being true,” Bucky said. “Besides, they ain’t the only bad guys out there, an’ if someone gets those words, I’mma be one of ‘em. Until we can get these out of my head, I don’t think I dare trust--”

“You cannot go back in cryo and pretend that nothing bad will happen,” Wanda said. “You want to sit around and feel sorry for yourself, go back to high school. You want to make up for what you did? Get off your ass.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bucky said, smiling a little, and offering her a mocking salute. “What do you suggest?”

Wanda twitched her fingers and her red-smoke magic surrounded him. “Just relax,” she told him, and even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t do anything other than let her hold him, support him, in all ways possible. “I’m just skimming your memories, enough to-- oh, oh, yeah, I’ve got it.”

“Got what?”

“A location,” Wanda said. “That lab of Zola’s, it was abandoned in 1972 for a more secure location, but who knows what’s still there? We might be able to find a clue, or direction.”

“If Hydra shut it down--”

Another wisp of power sparked from Wanda’s fingertips. “I can bring it back, whatever was once there, its presence has leached into the very bones of the place. You don’t need to worry about Hydra clean up. Unless they razed it to the ground and filled up the site with concrete, I should be able to find something.”

Bucky realized he was staring at her, mouth open. “God, I love you.”

Wanda grinned at him in the darkness, took his hand and placed it on her breast. “Prove it, soldier.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My name is Scott Lang. I'm Ant-Man...yadda yadda yadda. You've heard it all before. Truth is, I've always been kind of a lousy super hero. And before that, I was a failed criminal, a convict, and a terrible husband. Not much of a resumé even if you do print it single-sided, I guess.  
> \-- Scott Lang

“Why are you wearing that silly costume?” Wanda wondered. Scott Lang -- who had some technological control over his size -- was wearing the Ant-Man gear.

“Just in case,” he said, putting the arm down on the table, all draped with relatively clean sheets and blankets. “Some of these connections are tiny, if I miss one, I want to be able to go in and fix it without disconnecting the entire assembly.”

“You… are plannin’ on going up inside my arm?” Bucky asked, his expression wobbling between mildly freaked out and just plain bored. As much as Bucky must have seen over the decades, there was no way to tell what was going to upset him.

Bad dreams, she thought. That seemed to be it. Everything else rolled off him like water off a duck.

“Well, it’s not ideal,” Scott said. “But you know, I like to be prepared.”

“Boy scout,” Sam commented idly.

Bucky reached out for her, gripping Wanda’s hand. “So, we’re all gettin’ together to watch Lang here put me back together like a tinker toy?”

“Naw,” Sam said. “Cap’s gone out to do a patrol of the neighborhood, see what supplies we need. Nat’s getting with one of our contacts about a job.”

“Job?”

“We’re still Avengers, kid, whether we like it or not,” Clint said. “There’s some shit only we can handle.”

“Seems like a good way to get caught,” Bucky said, calmly. “You guys don’t exactly know the meaning of the word subtle.”

“That’s rich, coming from the guy who’s supposed to be the world’s best assassin and left a swath of destruction right through the middle of DC,” Sam said. “ _Was I here at all, or was it just the wind_?”

“Between you, me, and the wall,” Scott said, picking up a tool and reaching inside Bucky’s shoulder, “Stark knows we’re up to some shenanigans, and he’s just keeping it on the downlow. It’s unlikely that anyone else could bring us in, but Iron Man never seems to show up. I think he’s ignoring Ross as best he can.”

“He feels guilty,” Sam said. 

“We all should,” Bucky commented. “You were all used by a man with a grudge, and it’s left the world weaker for it.”

“Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you,” Scott said. “I can’t even see my kid because of this.”

“You could,” Clint said. “We’ve both been offered a pardon, to go home. Retire.”

“Yeah, that worked out so well for you last time,” Wanda said. “Retirement.”

Clint shook his head. They’d all go when Cap called, and they’d all stay, as long as Cap needed them. Everyone knew it. Except, maybe, Steve himself.

“Okay,” Scott said, “this is going to be a little tricky, this part right here, so, like, Mr. Soldier, if you could hold your breath for… forty seconds or so, and everyone else, shut up--”

“Tic Tac’s gettin’ a _little_ bossy,” Sam said, but they all piped down. Bucky squeezed Wanda’s hand again, his fingers warm in hers, and his blue eyes going distant and foggy. She could almost feel him going away, putting his mind somewhere else, while the work was done. A defense mechanism, probably left over from years of people working on him like he was a machine. A weapon, but not a person. 

_I’m here. I’ve got you._

A moment later, Scott pulled away. “Go ahead and take that for a spin, would ya?”

Bucky blinked, came back to himself from that distant place. “You’re done?”

“Well, unless you want me to slam your hand in the drawer to test your pain reflex, then, yeah, I’m done,” Scott said. “It was a pretty clever design, honestly. That Princess chick is really smart.”

“Docs? Yeah, she’s very intelligent,” Wanda said. “They can detect my abilities, too. I would not advise making an enemy of Wakanda.”

“We don’t have to,” Nat said, coming into the room. “They’re busy making an enemy of the world. Some sort of coup going on there, but I think we should wait it out a bit, they won’t appreciate us bumbling into the middle of an internal matter--”

“Like that’s stopped us before,” Clint said. “Besides, we owe Wakanda.”

“We owe them _courtesy_ ,” Bucky said. “Princess Shuri left a way to contact us, if she needs us. Let them ask for help before we go makin’ a mess.”

“Probably for the best,” Sam said. “Their tech way outmatches ours. I don’t want some of those weapons pointed at me.”

“That said, our source does have two situations that could use our assistance,” Natasha said. “There’s a cluster of those Extremis assholes making a fuss in Uganda, that’s definitely something we should clean up. And bits and pieces of Hydra are still active, mostly in the eastern slavic countries.”

“That’s us,” Bucky said. “I need to head that way, regardless, might as well clean up while we’re there, right?”

“You know Cap’s not going to want you in the field right away,” Sam pointed out.

“I’m not sure when anyone decided that I answered to Steve anymore. In case no one noticed, ain’t neither of us in the army,” Bucky said. “I’ve got a mission of my own up that way.”

“And I will be watching his back,” Wanda said. “Where he goes, I go.” 

Nat gave them both a long, searching glance. “You’ll be okay, James?”

“Maybe,” Bucky said. “But I can’t not try, an’ I don’t necessarily trust anyone else. You’re th’ only one else who might know what files to look for, what secrets that Hydra’s left you. And I’ll feel better if you’re keepin’ an eye on Steve.”

“It does seem to be my job, these days,” Nat said. “Very well, then. We’ll handle Uganda, you take Azerbaijan. Do you want any backup?”

Bucky shook his head. “Anyone who goes with us is at risk, if someone else gets my words. Don’t put any more blood on my hands.”

“And I can handle him,” Wanda said, “if that happens.”

“You can, but will you?”

“I will,” Wanda promised. “No matter what.”

She hoped that was a promise she could keep.

***

They drove. There was no way, not in these times of paranoid airport security theater, that they could fly. Bucky’s arm would never make it past the metal detectors, and while Wanda could control several of the security teams, there was no point in risking it.

Not to mention that there were other sources of concern for making that big of a splash -- what if Stark saw him? The rest of the renegades might have been free of his interference, or even benefiting from it, but Bucky?

No, he wanted a meeting with Stark, if there ever was one, to be entirely on his own terms. And preferably once he was back in his own mind, with complete control over his brain.

What were _his choices_ needed to be his, not random Hydra crap. And then, maybe, he’d be brave enough, and crazy enough, to seek out Stark for a reckoning.

Because that was coming, eventually.

It was a dim worry on the horizon, though.

Right now, the worries were Hydra, his brain, and local police.

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Bucky said. “I will if I have to, but I’d prefer not to have to. My hands are bloody enough.”

“That wasn’t your fault,” Wanda said.

A familiar refrain, if unimportant.

“No, I know that,” Bucky said. “An’ now I can make better choices, let’s make better ones. No killing. If we don’t have to.”

“I’m not a murderer,” Wanda said, not quite looking at him. She wasn’t looking at her reflection in the car’s side view mirror, either. But she wasn’t seeing what was out the window, either.

“Naw, doll, I’m not sayin’ that,” Bucky protested. His link to her wasn’t straining with it, either. She knew he wasn’t accusing her of anything, but sometimes things needed to be said out loud, in order to matter. Even when they weren’t true. Sometimes _especially_ when they weren’t true.

They were both murderers. And they both knew it.

People were dead who would not be, if neither of them had existed. Bucky had accepted that fact, had accepted it long before he became the Winter Soldier. He’d known it, made his peace with it.

Wanda, he thought, was still clinging to the idea of _being a good person_.

Bucky… well, he wasn’t a good person, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he couldn’t do good things, once in a while.

“What I am sayin’,” Bucky said, “is that we gotta be careful, and quiet. The more people what knows we’re movin’ around, the more likely it is that someone’s gonna start a fight.” _It always ends in a fight, Steve._

But if they were careful, and cunning, maybe they could start the fight with the right people. Killing, or even hurting, border guards and local police -- that didn’t help anyone.

“If they attack--”

“We don’t give them a reason to,” Bucky said. He knew her history, a little from what she’d told him, what the rest had told him, but-- “Think of it this way, even if you are defending yourself, the children of that border guard, his wife, his brother. All of those people… become your enemy. Every single one of them. Ones you haven’t met, that you’ll never know. And someday, doll, our luck’ll be down, and their’s’ll be up, and we’ll be jus’ as dead. I ain’t stupid enough to think that violence ain’t sometimes the answer, but let’s make sure we’re answerin’ the right questions, yeah?”

He knew a lot about that; wasn’t Stark the greatest evidence of it?

On both sides of the damn issue, even.

Bucky would have felt a great swell of pity for the guy, you know, except for the fact that he’d blasted Bucky’s arm off. He didn’t blame Stark for it, but it’d still fuckin’ _hurt_.

“Yeah, okay,” Wanda said.

“Enlightened self-interest,” Bucky said. “We don’t start anything, there won’t be anything. Which… now we’re in agreement, here, can you-- do anything about them seein’ us?”

“Sometimes,” Wanda said. “I can… convince them that they don’t want to look our way, but it requires that I can see… well, all of them. My powers don’t work on cameras, either, so if there’s someone watching a security feed, and I know they’re doing it, I can, in essence, blind them to us, but someone watching the tape, later? They’ll see and know we were there.”

“So, we avoid places with cameras,” Bucky said, “as much as possible.” Which wasn’t, he knew, particularly easy in these days. Someone was always watching.

“I know a few makeup tricks,” Wanda offered. “Nat taught me. It’s not gonna do much if they have gait analysis and biometrics on us specifically, but Stark’s not looking for us, and it’s a lot to invest in. Just for border crossing, we can obscure our features, enough.”

“Good,” Bucky said. “We’ll stop soon, get what you need, then cross the border in the morning. Consider it a test run.”

They had fake IDs, Nat had made them before they’d left, but Bucky knew better than to trust a straight up paper trail these days. How easily he’d been found, when Zemo wanted him found was proof enough of that. 

“You know I’ll do anything to help,” Wanda said. “Keep you safe. Keep all of us safe.”

Bucky nodded. “You’re gonna be fine, love.”

They pulled off near a good sized city, and Bucky let her go in, shopping, on her own. She said it was easier if she only had to fool people about one of them. She let him see her do it, so that if she had to come back to the small hotel where they’d checked in -- one of those by-the-hour places that didn’t record or ask questions out of courtesy to their business -- still in her disguise, he’d know who she was.

Not that he wouldn’t know who she was within seconds, anyway. He could feel her…

But he wanted to see how effective it was, anyway.

She let her power sizzle around her, and the woman who was standing in the hotel room looked more like Wanda’s blond cousin, a few times removed. Vaguely familiar, if you knew her, but not enough so that a guard or cop would feel like she was on a wanted poster. If Bucky concentrated hard enough, he could see that she was wearing a mask of some sort, but he couldn’t penetrate it, even knowing what she was doing.

It’d work.

“Go get your stuff,” Bucky told her. “And bring us back some food.”

She left their room after giving him a kiss that felt completely Wanda underneath, and if Bucky closed his eyes, he didn’t quite feel like he was cheating on her. She was walking prouder, taller. Like his praise and trust in her had given her confidence that she’d lost. Probably in that cluster fuck that ended in the Raft for most of Steve’s friends.

That they’d been caught-- imprisoned. That was enough to squash anyone’s confidence.

Bucky knew.

He’d been caught. Imprisoned.

He pulled up the phone, tapping accounts that Nat had said were safe, and started digging. Finding Hydra wasn’t necessarily going to be a problem -- they were alarmingly predictable sometimes. 

It was finding a way in without alerting the entire cell network that was going to be the tricky bit.

Honeymoon over, time to get to work. 


	9. Chapter 9

Turned out, getting past the border guards was the easiest part of the whole operation. The border station itself was relatively occupied, but they only had to deal with two guards, and Bucky had done something to the camera, diverted the feed for the few minutes it took to make the crossing. No one was suspicious. The border guards themselves were mostly bored, and Wanda used her powers to make them even more boring. A couple going to visit family on the other side of the crossing. Simple, easy, the sort of thing people did all the time.

And Wanda felt her power growing. It might have been Bucky; finding her soulmate had completed a part of her that she hadn’t even really known was missing. It might have been his calm influence, the way he knew things about espionage, and the way she could seem to access some of his memories and most of his skill.

It may just have been the practice. By the time they were in Azerbaijan, Wanda had used her powers dozens of times. Tiny little exercises that built up strength, endurance. Confidence.

She was learning to be more subtle with her powers, bending them in a way that made it less obvious. It wasn’t even much of a change. Bucky did quite a bit with wardrobe, hair styles, and makeup that made them pass as someone else, and a little added conviction from her powers and no one… noticed them.

Right up until someone did.

She’d noticed the good-looking man almost immediately upon entering the bar. He was hard not to notice, being typically American tourist, and in an area where an American probably shouldn’t be. He had a native woman with him, quiet, and desperately embarrassed for how loud and rude her companion was being.

Wanda noticed him, and then she tuned him out as being unimportant. 

She ignored the man’s companion as being long-suffering, and by refusing to pay attention to them, thought she was doing them a favor.

It wasn’t like she wasn’t familiar with Americans. 

Maybe it was something that Nat had taught her, in those few months when she’d been an Avenger, before-- well, before.

Bucky was asking questions, careful and sly. Fishing for information from a taxi driver who he was plying heavily with alcohol and food. Being friendly.

The woman glanced at Wanda, and turned away, but then she-- was watching Bucky.

It wasn’t easy to tell, she wasn’t so crude as to gape over her shoulder, and at first Wanda didn’t think much of it. Bucky was a very good looking man, and his voice was compelling, rough edged and sweet.

Of course, Wanda might have been a bit biased.

The woman was watching Bucky in the reflection of the mirror over the bar.

And she wasn’t eating her food, or doing more than taking a few sips of her drink, more for show than actual thirst. She didn’t wish to be rushed out of her spot. But why was that, exactly? Sympathy for the American who was paying her way, or because she wanted to watch Bucky?

Bucky nodded at something the man said, and then came to rejoin her. “Time to go,” he said in Sokovian, under his breath.

“What, why?” Wanda asked, but she was already getting their money sorted, laying out enough on the table that the waitress would just take it, and not chase them down for not going through the process. Tip and trouble. Questions, yes, she could ask questions, but she wasn’t hesitating, either. If Bucky said it was time to go, something was wrong.

“UN Task Force on their way,” Bucky said.

“Ross.”

“Someone spotted us,” Bucky told her. “They called it in. Whoever it was went straight past the tip-line, too. This is someone Ross trusts. Or, at least, believes.”

“I’m not going back to the Raft,” Wanda said, and it wasn’t the normal sort of bravado. Last time, they’d been caught, and taken away, held without a trial, or even without charges. They’d found out later, when Steve came for them, that Stark was, even then, working to obtain their release, putting his fortune and power base behind getting them out. 

Sometimes the direct approach was faster.

Easier.

But in retrospect, if they’d let Stark get them out, they’d have been _out_. Not renegades. Not wanted criminals. Not chased from one side of the globe to the other.

And still, she was not going back. 

She would burn the world down before she let someone put her back in a cage. 

“I won’t let that happen,” Bucky told her. 

“What do we do?”

“Get out of here,” Bucky said, and he took her hand and pulled her outside the shop, into the brightness of sunlight and into the crowd. 

Once she’d had it pointed out that there were enemies nearby, she saw them everywhere. A local law enforcement officer talking urgently into a radio, the way people looked at them, and then hurriedly looked away. The way mothers herded their children out of the street, and the way everyone was just a little too aware of them.

“They’re coming,” Wanda said, urgently.

Bucky smiled, a tightness around his eyes, and she could practically hear his jaw clenching. “I know.”

“What do we do?”

“Don’t let them catch us here,” Bucky said. “Civilians will get caught in the fallout.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say she didn’t care about civilians, when had the common people ever cared about her? Except that was how they’d gotten into trouble in the first place. The whole Sokovian Accords had been fought for the rights of people who weren’t involved not to die by having cars -- or cities -- fall on them.

The rights of people who didn’t want to be involved.

She wasn’t sure she cared about them, either. People, common every day people, ignored what didn’t concern them. They shut their eyes and didn’t see when it was her people dying, her people starving.

“If you’re going to kill someone, do it because they deserve it,” Bucky told her, and then he grabbed her wrist and they were running.

No sense in being subtle anymore, they were seen. Right now, it was make distance, and then once they had some distance, maybe they could play with tricks and tracks.

Or Wanda could just burn them all.

But Bucky was right.

Not here.

They had enemies enough without making more by accident.

_If you have to kill them, do it because they deserve it._

***

People who were scared made bad decisions. Bucky knew it. Everyone knew it. It was a fact.

Which meant scaring a lot of people all at once. As a former Hydra Asset, Bucky knew more about taking advantage of chaos than any rough troops the UN would be able to pull together. They didn’t trust Americans anymore, Stark wasn’t making weapons, even for his precious UN initiatives.

He had several crude flash bombs, smoke and heat and sparks. Not likely to kill anyone, although as crowded as the marketplace was, there were bound to be some injuries in a stampede. That happened; once you fell down with people running and panicking, it was hard to get back up.

Stepped on, tripped over, run down.

_Pin me in again, see how you like it_ , Bucky thought. And he threw one of those flash grenades, rolling it along the ground, sputtering and smoking, until it hit the boot of someone in military fatigues, who got only about five seconds to see it, kick it away, before it went off in a brilliant flame of rotten egg green smoke.

Which caused more of a panic than if the smoke had been some pretty, fancy color.

_Poison_ , people assumed, and they ran.[]

It was mayhem, moving through the streets. Bucky tossed a few more of his homemade flash grenades, some to add to the smoke that concealed them, and some to lead people off in the wrong direction. He had to assume they’d have air support; if he didn’t find some way to throw people off their trail, they’d be caught in no time.

He wasn’t worried about going to jail. He was worried what Wanda would do, if she felt like she was pinned in.

He merged them in with the crowd, pushing away from the confusion back at the bar.

It was different, working with a partner. With Hydra, if a mission had gone south this badly, he’d have dropped his team like hot rocks. Everyone on their own.

The few times they got separated for more than a minute, though, he discovered he didn’t have to worry. She could hone in on him using the soul link, and they were back together quickly enough. He didn’t have to worry that he’d lose her.

He probably would worry, anyway.

Bucky had never had much of anything. The Winter Soldier had never had _anything_. Being given something so rare and precious… well, Bucky didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he would burn the world down, to keep her safe.

They ducked into a covered alley to catch their breath, to assess the situation. They didn’t have multiple exit plans, so Bucky was making it up as he went. Seemed very Steve-like to him, and it wasn’t making him comfortable.

Another man and a woman practically ran them over in their hiding place.

The man was American, the woman-- no, she wasn’t a native on second glance. She was also American. Bucky dragged his gaze up to the man.

“I’d say _Hail Hydra_ ,” the man said, “but that’s all bullsht these days, isn’t it?”

“I know you, you were in--”

“Yeah,” the man said. “Don’t get any funny ideas. We’ll draw attention to ourselves and none of us want that, do we? The soldiers, they’re after you.”

Bucky gave the man a level stare. “They’re not rolling out the welcome wagon, no.”

“Turns out we don’t really want them in our business, either,” the man said. 

“You’re Hydra?” Wanda asked.

“So were you, once, sweetheart,” the man said. “I was on the team that sent the Staff to Strucker. I’ve been Hydra, I’ve been SHIELD, and now, me and Kara here are trying to figure out who we are, and who our allies are. We should work together. Something tells me that we’re just going to keep running into each other.”

“I’m like a bad penny,” Bucky said. “I always turn up.”

“Winter Soldier, yeah,” the man said. “We haven’t met, but I’ve seen you in passing. Of course, the whole world’s seen you in passing. Nice job, subtle. The whole Insight thing.”

Bucky considered the odds. That the man had been Hydra, almost definitely. Was still Hydra… outcome murky.

But better to keep an eye on him. Keep your friends close, your enemies _closer_. If was easier to spot a knife if you knew where the sheath was.

“You got a name?”

“Grant Ward,” the man said. “Come on, we have a safe way out of the city.”

Wanda took Bucky’s hand and squeezed it. “Can we trust him?”

“No,” Bucky said, “but we’re in a tough spot, and we need allies. I’m Barnes, this is Maximoff.”

“The mind-flayer, yeah, we’ve heard about you,” Kara said. “Everyone has heard about you, though. 

“What are you looking for?” Bucky wondered.

“Same thing you are, I would guess,” Grant said. “The chair.”

Bucky felt the whole world slip sideways. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Agent 33 died in 2015 on the Agents of SHIELD show and Ward somewhat later. But I wanted to borrow another set of lovers who were dealing with the whole brainwashed thing, so… Grant and Agent 33 are alive for the sake of this fic


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My name is Kara. And I don't work for you anymore.  
> \-- Agent 33

Wanda caught him, her powers sliding under the limp form of her soulmate as he fainted.

The woman, Kara, rolled her eyes, but didn’t comment. “It’s a bit of a shock, I guess,” Ward said, helping her to lower Bucky to the ground. “The Soldier was one of Hydra’s assets for a long time. I don’t know if he thought he was done with it, or what?”

Wanda didn’t bother to glare at Ward. She’d never met him, nor had she heard of him, which either meant when she was with Hydra, he was deep under cover, or he wasn’t that important. She was guessing the latter. He really didn’t look important, and he didn’t give off any of those telltale signs that said he was powered.

Just a spy. Just a turncoat, stuck in an operation in order to do as much damage as possible, upset and betrayed when Natasha had put all of Hydra and SHIELD’s files on the internet. Just a spy who’d somehow gotten all the information that _they_ needed.

She didn’t trust him. Bucky didn’t trust him. 

And based on the way Ward was looking at her, he didn’t trust her either.

Wasn’t surprising, really.

Hydra always had been a bed of snakes, liars, cheats.

She started to summon her abilities, the way her fingers got warmer, the way her mind sharpened, and she was going to look inside that man’s head, see what she could gather from him. And if he did anything, thought anything, she would rip him apart.

_… thomas, just listen to me, thomas, hold on, i didn’t mean it, i’ll--_

_You little brat._

_Pain, across his face, and then Christian was dragging him to the trough, forcing his face into the water, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t--_

“Get out of my head!” Ward pushed and she found herself on the ground, hands and knees, looking up at him. “Don’t think you can judge me. We were all born to be Hydra. Sometimes we chose them because they’re better than what we’re born with, and sometimes because of what the world has done to us. But I reject them, and you reject them, and it doesn’t matter if you can trust me, bitch, because right now, we’re all on the same side.”

Ward was braced for a fight, and Kara had circled behind her. Wanda could take them both, if she had to. But maybe… maybe she didn’t have to.

“Our own side,” Wanda rasped. “Did you kill him? Your brother?”

“Thomas is alive. SHIELD tried to use him against me. But he’s alive. He’s got a new name, a new family, somewhere no one can find him. Not even me.” Ward holstered his gun. “Christian? He’s dead as doornails, and he deserved it.”

“You?”

“Like I said, some of us were born to be Hydra.”

“I loved my brother,” Wanda said. “More than anything. Losing him ripped a hole in my chest, and even--”

“Even a soulmate doesn’t quite fill it,” Ward said, softly. “I know. I know. And revenge doesn’t make it stop bleeding. But we can move on from that. From Hydra. From the things we’ve done. We can move on.” He offered her a hand up.

She took it and let Ward help her to her feet. “We will move on.”

“We should move on, and that right soon,” Kara said, looking out through the mouth of the alley, hand on her gun, finger itching for a trigger. “We’re out in the open, here. Get him up.”

“If any chose to fight us, they will regret it,” Wanda said.

“That goes against the idea of being inconspicuous,” Ward said.

In months past, Wanda would have merely gone into the marketplace and put a thought in someone’s head. They’d go crazy, have a breakdown, scream and cry -- destroy an entire city block -- and create the perfect distraction.

 _I should be better than what they made me_ , Wanda thought. “Help me get him up. I will craft an illusion. Everyone will think he’s drunk; and no one will think much of a group of drunk Americans.”

“I have a car, about four blocks from here,” Ward said. “Can you make it that far?”

Wanda almost laughed. She’d made it so much further. “Yes.”

It was harder than she thought -- maybe her time with the Avengers had made her soft. Or-- she couldn’t help but think of her brother. He frequently carried her, but she’d never thought much of it. Pietro’s speed could take them quite a distance, before his arms even noticed her weight.

She noticed every bit of Bucky’s weight, the way she had to concentrate to keep his feet moving, the hold the illusion up, to walk herself.

She would have been more upset but she could sense Bucky’s brain whirring behind the mask of blessed unconsciousness. He was processing the information; that the chair was close, that someone else was looking for it.

That there were others, like him, who’d had everything taken from them, had a new set of instructions planted in their brains that overrode preexisting programs; Bucky, Kara, and turned them into--

“What happened to you?” Wanda asked Kara.

“It’s an old and boring story,” Kara said. “I was SHIELD, then Daniel Whitehall came into my life. I was captured, tortured, turned. I didn’t always look like this. In a Hydra mission gone wrong-- my face belongs to another SHIELD agent, Melinda May. The disguise is stuck, there’s nothing we can do.” There was a strange pain in the woman’s eyes.

“Who is May?”

“His old lover,” Kara said, jerking a chin at Ward. “Before Grant found me.”

“You’re soulmates?”

“We think so,” Ward said, overhearing. “We think the brainwashing is getting in the way.”

“Ah,” Wanda said, understanding. She knew that Bucky had truly broken his; he was entirely himself, no pieces of the program still clinging to his psyche. But one maniac with his trigger words would set all that work back, would undo everything he’d suffered trying to become himself again.

She could understand wanting to dig out that programming. Especially if it was getting in the way of a true mating.

On the other hand, the way she looked at him, so full of longing and need, and the way he didn’t quite look back. “And if you’re wrong?”

“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Ward said, bruskly. “Even if we’re not mates, even if we can’t be, or we’re too broken for it-- Kara deserves to be her own person. Even if I can never be-- what she needs.”

Wanda nodded, trying to be understanding. But she didn’t trust Ward. Whatever he wanted, whatever he thought he needed… she had a feeling that even for a soulmate, Ward’s priorities were Ward first.

*** 

Bucky came back to an awareness of himself and his surroundings with a start. Or, he didn’t startle, because that reaction had been well trained out of him well before Hydra got their hands on him. But he went from half-unnerved dreaming to awake and getting a feel for the situation in mere seconds.

There was a rumble under his butt and feet that was familiar. And a smell to the vehicle he was in.

_Hydra._

His eyes snapped open, but Wanda was right there. 

“Hey,” she said, softly. “Feeling any better?”

“Where are we?” Trivialities like his feelings would wait until he had an accurate sitrep.

“Ward’s van,” Wanda said.

“Smells like Hydra,” Bucky said. But there were no cuffs on his wrists, he wasn’t in his black tac gear. There was no mission, no words, no handlers. Just his lady love and her red coat and her concerned gaze.

There was no grill of bars that separates him from the driver and the passenger, and he and Wanda were sitting in bucket seats behind them, not on benches in the back. The strange like and not-like tugged at his brain for a moment before settling.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize I needed to sanitize the vehicle,” Ward said. “Using what assets we have, sometimes means Hydra money, Hydra property, Hydra protocols.”

_Means I might not be able to tell when these clowns go from helpfuls to hostiles._

Wanda glanced at him. _It will be all right. I am watching him._

“You heard that?” Bucky asked out loud.

“Yeah, well, I’m a soldier, too, even if I was never like you,” Ward said, misconstruing the question, but Wanda squeezed his fingers. 

_I heard you._

“There’s a safehouse just outside city limits, maybe twenty miles from there to the lab, over some pretty rough ground,” Ward said. “I’ve got a bead on some ATVs, we’ll take those. If we need to split off from each other after the raid on the lab, that’ll be the best time.”

Which wasn’t a bad plan, Bucky reflected. Having separate getaway vehicles was safer for everyone. Ward might just be playing his own game and not Hydra’s. That was probably good. Risky, still, because Hydra.

Bucky considered the expediency of dumping Ward and Kara after the mission, but-- well, if he was going to ever break away from Hydra, he had to stop acting like Hydra, didn’t he?

“You got a map of this lab?” Bucky wondered, leaning forward. 

“We have some intel, yes,” Ward said, cautious. “We’ll make a plan of attack from the safehouse.”

 _What are you getting out of this, Mr. Ward?_ Bucky thought. Most of the time, the more people on a covert op, the more chance of discovery. But Hydra was dead, scattered, disorganized. Maybe it could really be as simple as walking in there, running a deprogrammer, and getting out.

_And maybe pigs will fly._

“All right,” Bucky said. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His head ached. It wasn’t bad enough for a mission scrub; he’d absolutely be able to fight with minimal impairment, but it did hurt, and he was still tired. “Wake me when we get there.”

Let them feel at ease, like he and Wanda were eating out of their hands. If it was a trap, he might as well be rested when they got to that point.

The ride to the safehouse was… uneventful. The Winter Soldier was awake, aware, active in the back of Bucky’s head, checking the corners and doors, checking their dubious allies, watching sight lines and access points. It was just getting dark, visibility was low. Bucky and Wanda slipped out of the vehicle. “You two go in the front,” he ordered.

Ward scoffed, but didn’t object.

Two pronged entrance, front and rear. No signs of forced entry in the building. No smell of recent habitation. There was a thin layer of dust on the kitchen table and the scent of very old milk in the sink. Bucky ran the tap water.

“No one’s here,” Kara reported, coming out from the bedroom. “No one’s been here. Not for a while, at least.”

Bucky nodded. “We’ll need a supplies run, nothing here but protein bars and tap water.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Kara said, tapping something at the side of her neck. A moment later, she looked like someone else -- someone Bucky didn’t know.

“Photostatic veil,” she said, her voice shifting, modulating. “I had an accident with it. The face I was born with is gone, and this thing is sealed on. I have about a dozen choices, but… I’m not one of them.” Bucky felt a sudden well of sympathy. He knew what it was like not to know his own reflection. At least he was remaking himself in his own image. He couldn’t imagine what being stuck with a face not his own was like. 

“Handy,” was all he said, because he knew the tense tone of voice, too. _Don’t ask me questions, I won’t tell you lies._  

“Food, water, coffee. I’ll be back in an hour.” 

And like the wind, she was gone.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _I'm not looking for mercy or absolution. I just want you to know, I've been where you are right now. Filled with rage, wanting revenge... I chose HYDRA for petty, personal, selfish reasons... for a father figure, for vengeance... for closure. But what I saw today gave my life meaning._ \-- Grant Ward

“Bedroom one, clear,” Bucky said, as he and Ward went through the entire safehouse like they were in enemy territory, expecting hostiles at any minute. Wanda tried not to grumble about it; any Hydra agents with guns would be a simple matter for her. There were days when she thought it actually might not be possible to kill her, and she wondered what she would do if that was the case, living on eternally while everyone she loved and cared about grew old and died.

“Sightlines from neighbors, clear,” Ward reported.

“Come on, the house is clear, I’ll start a bug sweep and you can check to see if there’s anything we missed,” Kara said. She had a backpack full of some sort of computer equipment.

She dropped supplies on the kitchen table, tinned soups and canned meats and bread and jam. It was food, they could eat. It wasn’t going to be appetizing. Sometimes she missed the Avenger’s compound. She’d had so much more there than she’d realized at the time.

Wanda closed her eyes for a moment, reached into some slightly altered plane of existence, searching for the little webs and crawlers that indicated computer taps. As far as she could tell, there was nothing, but let Kara do the sweep without objecting. There was no reason to tip her hand. They had neighbors on one side, and across the street, but the house on the other side was empty, and easily accessible. They could get to it right away if they needed to flee with cover.

No one seemed particularly interested in the house; she swept again, looking for life signs. Squirrels, nesting in the attic, chewing on insulation, but they wouldn’t be here in the winter, when they’d need protection from the cold. Probably.

The mental flavor of the house seemed to be neglect; like many other low-end assets, when Hydra fell apart, no one cared what happened. There were probably hidey holes and accounts, weapons and plans, scattered all over the world, but enough of Hydra had been brought down, what was left of them were scrambling for purpose, for power.

Eventually, someone would probably come looking, but maybe this place was safe, for now.

She set about putting the food away, dusting off the counters, checking to see if there was any flatware. She flipped one of the ceramic plates and saw the Hydra symbol, tiny, neat, green and red, stamped on the bottom.

They have Hydra brand ceramics? She rolled her eyes and resisted the urge to smash it onto the floor.

“Did you actually buy any food we could cook,” Wanda wondered.

“No,” Kara said. “If I did that, we’d be expected to cook. I’d rather eat out of a crinkly package any day of the week than be held responsible for cooking an edible meal just because I have a uterus.”

“Bucky cooks,” Wanda said.

“Then Bucky can do the fucking shopping,” Kara said, but she gave Wanda a wink and Wanda wasn’t quite sure what the wink meant. Just kidding? Or I’m saying I’m just kidding because I should, but I’m really not kidding.

“You know, I have no idea what this is,” Wanda said, holding up a packet.

“Spamwich,” Kara told her. “Bread and ham and chicken and beef and cheese all put in a blender, squirted out a tube, baked and solidified. With a honey glaze.”

“Sounds revolting,” Wanda said, pushing it into a back corner and reminding herself to never, ever eat it.

Kara shrugged. “It’s food. It’s amazing what you’ll eat if you’re hungry enough.”

“Turnips,” Bucky said, coming back into the kitchen.

“Eh, no guns in the domestic areas,” Wanda scolded. “I want to live in a house, not a warzone.”

“Man, you picked the wrong line of work, sweetheart,” and that was Ward. “I think we’re clear, if we want to go ahead and settle in, we’ll make plans tomorrow for recon at the Hydra facility, and if everything looks good to go, we’ll be able to get in day after and unprogram you two.”

_Optimism,_ Wanda thought. _It was a strange look on a Hydra agent._

***

Two well equipped ATVs were in the garage, along with helmets and jackets. Bucky almost scoffed at the idea of needing to wear a helmet, but it would probably keep from drawing attention. The jacket was nice, snug and leather with a kevlar mix along the back. Bucky’s was straining a little around his chest, and Wanda’s drooped. She was a tiny little thing, with a slender waist and short torso.

They’d mapped out the area using hacked satellite feeds. Kara was particularly talented with the computer, unencrypting the data and running a password algorithm. “Talents you got from Hydra?”

“No, SHIELD,” she said. “Hydra didn’t bother training agents in covert computer warfare. For decades, all the computer and data information they needed funneled through Camp Lehigh. Through Zola.”

Bucky shuddered. He knew that Zola had changed, been changed, moreso even than Bucky had, but he’d never seen the collection of server racks and monitors that made up the mad scientist. In truth, he hadn’t seen Zola at all since a few months after the arm had been installed. Once Zola had been successful with his operation to create a supersoldier, he’d gone on to the next project. And the next one.

God only knew what twisted brothers and sisters Bucky had out there, other people who’d been used and discarded, or experimented on and survived.

There had been, at one point, other Winter Soldiers. Stronger, faster, more dedicated to the cause.

They were all dead now, and good riddance to them, Bucky thought.

But they’d been post-Zola.

What had he done, Bucky wondered, between the late fifties when he’d grafted the arm onto Bucky’s unwilling frame, and the seventies when he’d started building the server units that he’d eventually inhabit?

Questions for another time, perhaps.

Now, it was time to start the process of ending the thing that he’d become. So that he could become someone else, someone new. Maybe, in the end, deserve the gift he’d been given.

“Sap,” Wanda accused, smacking him between the shoulderblades as she climbed onto the ATV behind him.

“You heard what I was thinking?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “More, I felt it. We’ll work on it more, after--”

After.

Bucky couldn’t really see anything further ahead than getting rid of those goddamn words that changed everything that he had been, made himself into everything that he didn’t want.

“We ready, kids?” Ward asked, sliding his helmet on and activating the comm units inside.

“As we’re going to get,” Bucky replied. “Let’s do this.”

They separated shortly after hitting the off roads portion of their recon, Bucky and Wanda circling to the east, Ward and Kara taking the west end.

Bucky wasn’t sure if they’d selected their path based on ease of access, because the eastern edge of the compound was so much thick wood and impenetrable underbrush--

“Just park it,” Wanda said. “I can fly us the rest of the way. No noise that way, too.”

“Well, don’t go lookin’ like some sort of scarlet kite,” Bucky said with a grin. “They won’t miss that, if there’s anyone watching.”

“You’re almost as bossy as Steve,” Wanda complained. “You want my help or not?”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “I am capable of walking,” he said. 

“Suit yourself,” Wanda said, pushing off from the ground with her powers. One of these days, Bucky was going to make a list of everything that she could do. For what purpose, he really wasn’t sure, but it’d be nice to just… know.

“I have no idea of the extent of my abilities,” Wanda said. “We experimented with it, back when I was with Hydra, and then the Avengers. Flying, telekinesis, mental control, nightmares, shielding, breaking atomic bonds.”

“What’s that last one?”

“Exploding things,” Wanda said, showing off and floating backward as Bucky clambered over downed trees and jumped over thorn bushes, and pushed through thick weeds and underbrush. “Or, like this--”

She extended a hand and cut a swath of plant life, giving Bucky a clear, slightly smoking, path to walk on.

“Oh, that’s handy.”

“I like to think I’ve got my uses,” Wanda retorted.

“Could you two stop with the newlywed canoodling,” Kara said. “We’ve got some movement on the north end. At least two squads.”

“Who are they?”

“I didn’t go up and introduce myself,” Kara snapped over the radio. “They’re in tactical gear, with no logo. Could be a SHIELD or Hydra deep cover teams. Could be some rando mercenary. A lot of Hydra went merc after the Fall. Probably not a government sanctioned team, and it’s doubtful there’s Avengers involvement, so we’re probably good if we go in hot.”

Bucky couldn’t help glancing upward. If it was Avengers, they’d have air support, and computer tactical backup and extraction plans. No choice, not really. They needed to be free and clear, and even if it was an Avenger’s op, or government sanctioned, Bucky couldn’t see them giving over the tech for two ex-Hydra agents out of the goodness of their hearts. 

“Let’s try for non-lethal,” Bucky sad, reluctant to kill anyone else, unless they were Hydra, and without being sure…

“Right,” Ward drawled. “You can do that if it helps you sleep at night, sunshine. I’m ‘a if they try to kill you, kill ‘em right back’ kind of guy.”

“How adorable,” Bucky muttered. You could always tell when someone had a proper upbringing. He didn’t really want to know about Ward’s upbringing. In fact, the faster they could do this, and get out, the better.

Bucky twitched his chin in the direction of the bunker. Wanda nodded. “I’ll take air support,” she said. “See you inside.”

Bucky got his weapons prepped and started moving, covering the ground at a quick pace, running flat out when he hit open ground.

Whoever the teams were, they were also of a shoot-first mentality, and as Bucky took a graze along his shoulder, they weren’t aiming to injure. Still, he got off two shots before Wanda blew something up and distracted them, both knee shots.

One of the men managed to limp away, the other was still holding his leg and whimpering softly when Bucky caught up to him.

Bucky’d been told he looked like cold death coming when he was in his tactical gear, emotionless expression plastered on his face, even under the mask. 

The soldier blanched and Bucky couldn’t imagine what he was seeing.

“Declare yourself,” Bucky demanded. 

“Huh?”

“You Hydra? Shield? _Mercs_?”

The man held up his hands. “I’m not in charge,” he said, shaking. 

“I asked who you answer to,” Bucky said. “Go on, stall. You’ve got another knee. And elbows. I can put you in a lot of pain without killing you.”

The man appeared to strengthen his resolve somehow. His jaw worked. “Hail Hydra.” And he bit down.

“Fuck,” Bucky said, turning the guy on his side, sweeping a finger through his mouth. Too late. “Cyanide capsules,” he reported. “Its Hydra.”

“Bet your ass it is,” someone said, a familiar someone. Bucky whipped all the way around, but couldn’t spot where the voice was coming from. 

“Rumlow,” Bucky said. “Show yourself.”

“Ah, they don’t call me that anymore,” Rumlow said. “I’ve got a new name. I’ll tell it to you. But right now-- _Longing_.”

Bucky screamed, realized that the voice was coming to him through the comms unit. He reached up, as if to snag it away, and something hit him, grabbing through his armor, his skin, digging little holes into his arm. “Rusted.”

An electrical net enveloped him, not enough electricity to really injure, although it was unbearable, the way a current was always unbearable, but enough to seize his muscles so he couldn’t move. Couldn’t stop it. “Furnace.”

“Daybreak.”

Bucky was screaming. Where the hell was his soulmate?

His heart squeezed, ached, and--

He heard a dim echo, other words. Not English, but Sokovian. “ _Spindle. Tourmaline_.”

_Wanda_? Bucky wrenched his chin up, looking to the sky. 

Wanda was there, hovered as if trapped in amber. Unmoving. Listening. Compliant.

Compliant.

_“Freight Car.”_

The Winter Soldier was ready to comply.

The Scarlet Witch was ready to comply.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Kill them! Now! While they are helpless! Crush them!” Scarlet Witch, Earth 616

There was a very small part of the Scarlet Witch that was indignant about being forced to act. That she was not owned, she was not property, she was not under the jurisdiction of these petty little humans who tied her down with words and whips.

That small part of herself was called Wanda, and she was alive.

Unfortunately, that part of her was buried down deep. All around her was rage and the need to destroy.

There were people in the world who had taken from her things that belonged to her, and they needed to be destroyed.

_Tony Stark._

She’d never finished that mission, she’d allowed him to live, she’d been convinced, somehow--

Next to her flame, there was ice. Ice in her mind, sharing a soul with her.

She looked, inward and outward.

The Winter Soldier was at attention, all his focus on the scarred man wearing black armor with a skull painted on it. The Scarlet Witch knew that man. Hadn’t she killed him, once before.

“Didn’t I kill you?” she asked, calm and collected. Her soulmate, the Winter Soldier, didn’t even shift toward her, but she could feel him, in her mind. “I killed you, when you tried to kill the Captain.”

She had killed him. It had been the start of the so-called Superhero Civil War, that had ended with her in prison. Trapped.

Again.

She was burning the chains around her mind.

_Compliance is its own reward._

The Winter Soldier was looking at her now, anxious. She was probably the only one who could sense his unease; he’d barely moved, just enough that she could see the way he watched her. His face was impassive, cold. A killer’s. 

But his heart beat just a little faster.

He wasn’t afraid of her.

_He was afraid for her._

What they would do to her, if she did not comply. What they might do to him, to make her comply. She caught a glimpse of the various tortures they’d used on him, to break him, to shape him into their creature. Endless nights, where they wouldn’t let him sleep until he was sobbing, hallucinating, body wracked with cramps. Endless days of agony. Splintered moments of being shocked, electricity running through his body.

Weights on his chest until he couldn’t breathe. Until his ribs separated and his lungs bled.

And those were only the times they were actively causing pain for pain’s sake; not months and years of working on his arm without any pain relief. Not the freezing agony of going into cryo or the fierce burning of coming out of cryo. Or all the endless, numbing years in between.

And he knew, and because he knew, she was told -- they would do all those things to him, as soon as they figured out that she cared about him. They would hurt her, and he would not be able to stop them, and he would not be able to stop _himself_ from reacting.

 _Comply,_ his thoughts insisted _. Don’t let this happen._

 _We are not things._ The Scarlet Witch felt her fingers twitch, the growing hex power surging in her.

“Hydra don’t stay dead, bitch,” the man named Rumlow said, as if their thoughts had taken no time at all. Maybe they hadn’t. 

She had killed him. Encased him in an explosion of his own making. The pressure had been more than she’d expected and her shield tore. Better the explosion mid-air, killing Rumlow and a dozen or so diplomats than on the ground, murdering hundreds of market-goers.

Not that anyone had seen it that way.

Would Steve have been considered a murderer if he blocked gunfire with his shield and the ricochet had killed someone.

She didn’t understand how _the man with the bomb_ hadn’t been held responsible for his own actions. If the Avengers hadn’t gotten involved at all, who knew how much damage Rumlow would have done with the stolen bio-weapon.

_Ungrateful._

_Comply._ The Winter Soldier broke protocol enough to take a step toward her, put his hand on her wrist. Her power sparked at the touch, burning hotter. She could feel his terror, not for himself, but for her. Could feel the love he had for her, even when he should have been cold and empty.

Even Rumlow had noticed now, that there was something wrong, that--

“Fine, whatever,” he snapped. “Kill her, she’s malfunctioning.”

The Winter Soldier reached for his sidearm. His impassive face didn’t crack, he showed no emotion to echo that which was roiling under his skin.

“I love you,” Wanda told him, but she didn’t move, didn’t stop him. 

“I know.”

Bucky whirled and shot Rumlow right between the eyes. His blood exploded out of him and splattered on the wall like one of those ink-blot tests.

***

It hadn’t been like when he’d seen Steve, all muddled confusion and trying to swim through the sludge of his memories like it was a swamp.

This was more like, being drawn to the light by a radiant being. He’d known Wanda, the Scarlet Witch, even as he struggled against Hydra’s control. He could never have hurt her, and if Rumlow hadn’t been such a fucking tool, he would have been able to figure it out.

“You okay?”

“No,” Bucky said. Because that was true, then, “yeah, functional.” Because that was also true.

“We heard shooting,” Kara was saying in his earpiece.

“They’re dead. We’re fine.”

Bucky wasn’t sure how long he’d actually been firing. He could distinctly recall shooting Rumlow, but not any of the others who’d come in waves after Rumlow went down. He had a brief, but vivid, picture of Wanda gesturing and a half dozen of them falling over without so much as a scream.

He didn’t ask what she’d done to them.

He didn’t want to know.

Also, it was certain that they’d deserved it.

“So, we’re clear? That’s it?” Ward sounded both shocked and relieved.

“It’s the Winter Soldier,” Wanda said, raising an eyebrow that Ward couldn’t see through the radio, but was nonetheless conveyed in her tone. “You expected to point him in a direction and for him to _fail_?”

“Well, I suppose not, no,” Ward admitted. “Fist of Hydra and all that.”

“Don’t remind me.” Bucky said, not looking at the bodies. “Let’s see if we can find that chair and get us all fixed up.”

Ward, he noticed, did not bother to look away, although that might have been more that there was enough blood not to want to step in it. “Good work,” Ward said. So much for that theory.

“Necessity,” Bucky said. “Rumlow had my words.”

“And that asshole over there had mine,” Wanda said, pointing. “I didn’t even know I had words.”

“Yeah, well, Scarlet Witch,” Ward said, “you were a volunteer.”

“Only until I knew what I was volunteering for,” Wanda protested. “I changed sides!”

“We’re not here to bicker about that,” Kara said. “I was Shield, so, we’re all one the same side here. Ours.”

There was a moment where the rest of them all refused to meet each other’s gaze, vaguely ashamed.

And then they followed Kara off into the bowels of the Hydra base.

A quick stop by the armory showed that they hadn’t bothered to clean house before they left, either, and Bucky stocked up on several knives, grenades, and guns that he might otherwise not have had access to, and a whole case of Judas bullets, which could tear through superpowered skin. 

That would probably come in handy eventually.

“What is that,” Ward asked. 

“Chitauri enhanced ammunition,” Bucky said. “Hammer tech. Highly illegal, but that never seemed to stop him. Even when he’s in jail.”

“Being in jail didn’t stop me, either,” Wanda said. 

Deeper in the base, several floors down, they found a vault that looked horrible familiar. Bucky was cold all over, just looking at it. “This is the place.”

Ward glared at the lock for a moment, then started pulling out explosives. “I guess we need to knock.”

Wanda scoffed. “Like this?”

And she blew the vault door clear off the hinges, flinging it over their heads and hitting the wall on the far side, barely flicking her fingers to do so.

“Uh, yeah, or that works, too,” Ward said. 

“I remember that trick,” Bucky said. “You brought half a building down, first time I saw it.”

“Sometimes I think, if I practice enough, I could crack the planet.”

“Well, don’t practice then,” Kara said. “I live here.”

Bucky hadn’t seen a Chair in over two years, and he viewed it with dread, sitting there in the middle of the room like some displayed menace. Just seeing it was enough to turn his stomach, to make him want to puke, scream, struggle.

And he was going to voluntarily sit on that hard plastic, he was going to let them--

“Bucky, we don’t have to…”

“Yeah, we do,” Bucky said. “I didn’t go full feral today, but what happens if some asshole has my words and you’re not with me? I can’t be responsible for that. I have enough stain on my soul.”

“Put blame where it belongs,” Kara said. “On the people that have done this to us.”

“They’re mostly dead,” Ward said. “Justice is overrated, revenge doesn’t solve anything. All we can do is fix what we can, and move forward from here.”

Kara flipped switches on the computer, bringing the rig to life. It whirred and hummed to itself like it was satisfied. Like the machine had a purpose, and it relished it.

She tapped several keys, then plugged in a thumb drive. “All right, I’m in, and-- here’s the deprogramming. I got it from Shield. Coulson was working on it, back in the day.”

“Asshole,” Ward said.

“I know you don’t like him, but he’s a useful tool.”

“This will work?” Wanda questioned.

“Probably,” Ward admitted. “Coulson’s not Hydra, never was. Kept trying to rescue us, like we were damn kittens or something. Right up until he started trying to kill us. But his team is good. If Coulson gave this a green light, it works. Skye probably wrote it.”

“So, who’s going first?”

“Me,” Bucky said. Not because he was brave, but because he wasn’t. If he went first, then it was over with, and he didn’t have to sit and anticipate and dread it.

He sat down and let the chair lock him in place. 

If Ward and Kara betrayed them, Wanda wouldn’t leave enough of them to fill a bucket.

And if it worked.

Then he’d be free.

_Finally._


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"After all... I'm agent Grant Ward. I just jumped out of a plane without a parachute on and saved your life!"_ \-- Grant Ward

If there was ever a time to trust someone, implicitly and absolutely, it was at that moment; when Bucky sat in the chair, and let them fit the headpiece over his temple. 

“I’m here,” Wanda said, and she squeezed his fingers. 

Bucky shook her loose. “You can’t-- I’ll break your fingers, love.”

Kara offered him a rubber bite guard and he took it without hesitating, but Wanda could feel the hesitation in him. The doubt, the fear. He didn’t trust them, but like a man in free fall, he was trusting that he could learn to fly because that was all he had left.

Hope.

That’s all that they had. 

Hope and each other. “I’ll still be here,” she promised. “No matter what.”

Kara activated some of the computer’s systems. “We’ll all be here. And you still get to fix me, next.”

“Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” Ward said, and he put his arm around Kara’s waist, looking over her shoulder at the computer interface.

“Are we ready?” Wanda asked. Bucky was rolling his eyes, toward her, away, blinking. He was terrified, and he was not ready, and they didn’t need to be calm, they needed to fucking go already.

The whole chair tipped backward, and Bucky’s biceps were tightening, she couldn’t see his eyes anymore. A halo came up to guard his temples.

“It’ll work, Glitter Girl,” Kara said, and then she flipped several switches. “You might want to back up. I think this will be a little unpleasant.”

She turned the last switch and then Bucky was screaming behind the mouth guard. He strained against the restraints, but he couldn’t move, and she knew that this was necessary, it was--

Wanda let out a sob.

The cords in his neck were visible against the skin, his skin was turning red, he--

It was over.

He was panting raggedly for breath, drenched in sweat, slack in the restraints.

“He’s wiped, and the codewords are removed.” Kara said. “Everything’s gone, undone. A blank slate. Now-- the unlock procedure. Once his mind is unlocked, he’ll have full access to his memories. All of them. And then, it will be done.”

The chair moved back to its upright position, and Bucky’s eyes were as wide and guileless as a child’s. And then he saw her. And he smiled.

“He knows me,” Wanda said.

“Good sign,” Kara said. “The soul mate link stayed stable. So, when we unlock him, he’ll be able to hold onto it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Barnes killed a lot of people under Hydra’s command,” Ward explained. “It’s unknown how much of that he actively remembers, or has repressed, or was allowed to keep. There’s no point in having an assassin who will spill his guts the moment he’s back in friendly hands. There’s no way to know, at this point, how he’s going to deal with the guilt of his actions.”

“He didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Maybe not,” Ward said, “but he still did those things. He’ll remember it. Just… be prepared to hold on to him. So we don’t lose him.”

Wanda had never had quite enough training being delicate with a mind. Hydra hadn’t wanted delicate, they’d wanted a sledge hammer. They had other means to control things delicately. They wanted Wanda on the field as a tactical nuke, not a scalpel. But she’d learned anyway. A little. How to slide sideways into someone’s mind, to find those dark, scary places that they’d put fences around and said Abandon all Hope, Ye Who Enter.

She knew how to pull those fences down, to find a weak point in the psyche and exploit it.

None of that would do her any good now. She needed to find those rocks in Bucky’s mind and pull them together into a fortress, to protect him from the truth, to give him shelter from those things he’d done.

The first rock was easiest to find, huge and sunk deep into the bedrock of his mind.

Steven Grant Rogers. 

She pulled up every memory she could find of Steve, every bit of friendship, every moment of fond exasperation. Bucky had tried so hard to protect a boy, and later a man, who had absolutely no sense of self-preservation. As a child, Steve had been expected to die young. No one held that truth back from Steve, and he decided if he had to die, his life was going to be worth something. His death was going to have value to someone.

“You two,” Wanda said, fondly, and then started building a house around Bucky’s psyche, based on the foundation of Steve Rogers. It was blocky and there were cracks, but it was the best she could do in a short period of time, and she didn’t have a lot to work with. Bucky’s life had been torn down so many times, there wasn’t much holding it together.

Even his soulmate could provide only a little protection.

“We’re ready,” Wanda said, finally.

“Soldier,” Kara said. “Wake up.”

Those final command codes; Wanda felt them slide into his mind like a key, and opened the floodgates.

Bucky screamed, and then again, his voice straining to convey grief, guilt, rage. Wanda took the rage, fashioned it into an even smaller shield. “I’m here, I’m here with you, my love. None of this was your fault, none of it your choice.”

Except that wasn’t always and entirely true.

She saw fragments; a chance where he could have escaped, if he was willing to leave Natasha behind and forget her. Another, when he could have gone home from the war, and not chosen to follow that stupid kid from Brooklyn. He was the one who stepped in, the one who helped out, the one who got up one last time, not for the world, not for an idea, but for a person. A single person who needed to be saved. Every time, when Bucky had been offered a chance to rest, someone had come to him and said, I need your help.

And Bucky had helped them.

Often, almost always, and deeply, to his own disadvantage.

He was the best of men, not the one who wouldn’t compromise, who wouldn’t trade lives, but one who would give his own soul, so that someone else might live.

_It doesn’t have to end in a fight, Buck._

_It always ends in a fight._

_You can rest, beloved,_ Wanda told him. _I’m here. I can protect you._

She didn’t know when Grant or Kara had loosed Bucky’s bonds, or if she’d done it herself, with a flick of her mind’s powers. But he was holding onto her, and she was holding him up. 

They were together, even more so than before.

***

Kara’s wipe was better -- and worse -- than his own had been.

At least when it was him, at least it was him, he felt the pain, and there was no room in his head for much of anything else. No conflict, no guilt, no concern. Just pain. White lightening agony that erased everything that he was and everything that he could be. And that was all.

Watching someone else go through it, even someone he didn’t particularly like or trust.

That was horror.

Watching someone else scream and writhe and buck up against the restraints, watching the bit fall out of their teeth as they could only gasp for air.

It was worse, even then listening to his beloved say the words, the ones that had been used, so long, to utterly control him. Knowing the words wouldn’t work, but they each felt like poison anyway, like something loathsome and horrible.

He’d likely never be able to hear those words without some sort of visceral response. 

But he hadn’t come out of it with a Ready to Comply on his lips, and for that, he’d be forever grateful.

He knew that this was what Kara needed, she had to go through it, and Ward needed them there for the same reason they had needed him. To keep anyone from doing something _stupid_.

When it was over, both Kara and Ward were crying; Kara from pain and terror, Ward from relief, but Bucky couldn’t look away from that, either. It was private, personal, but he and Wanda were probably the only two people in the whole world who could understand what they were going through. They stood there, lending silent support.

Even the lowest of the low, those who had chosen Hydra, they were all capable of redemption. Blind, or willfully, in pain and torture, or through blood; they’d all been soaked in Hydra’s lies, in their deceptions and they’d all brought great evil into the world.

And they were all still worthy of being saved.

“What are you thinking so hard on, love?” Wanda asked.

“I think that I love you,” Bucky said. “And that you saved me.”

“We saved each other,” Wanda replied. “All of us.”

“And I think when we get back, we owe a debt to the world,” Bucky said. “I mean, knowingly or not-- we’ve done pretty terrible things, and Hydra’s not going to care to put the pieces back together.”

“I have some ideas,” Wanda said. “And I know some people who might be willing to let us try them.”

“Such as?”

“There’s more than just us, in the world, who were Hydra, or Ten Rings-- and who want out. I think we could do that. Rather than use our powers on the main stage, where normal people have to see us and be afraid… I said one time I couldn’t control their fears, only my own. But--”

“We can make it so people aren’t scared. At least not of us.”

Ward looked up, his arms still around Kara’s shoulders. “Yeah, I might… it’s not what I’m going to do, but I know some people. We can… help each other out, a bit.”

Bucky nodded, slowly. Maybe. Well, Ward probably did have the contacts, but Bucky still wasn’t sure if he trusted the man. Guess he’d have to see; extend a hand and see if it got bitten off. There was no other way to prove trust.

“For right now,” Wanda said. “I just want to go somewhere nice, take a bath, eat something, and sleep for the next five years.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Bucky said.

“We owe you everything,” Kara added. “Both of us. If-- we could not have gotten this far, this fast. If there is ever anything you need, do not hesitate.”

“Thank you,” Bucky said. “But I think we’re square. Without your expertise, we’d have had to drag this thing back to someone who could make use of it. And once it was in someone else’s hands, no matter how good their intentions were--”

“We’re going to destroy it,” Kara said, flatly. “Even if it’s nothing but a symbol.”

“Well, hopefully it’s a little more’n that,” Bucky said. “But yes.”

“Good thing I always bring a bomb,” Wanda said, and she smirked, her eyes glowing softly red. “You might want to take a step back.”

Watching his soulmate utterly destroy the thing that had nearly destroyed Bucky’s soul was… satisfying in a way that he would never be able to express. She didn’t just blow it up, she unwove it from the fabric of existence. There wasn’t even enough of it left to scrape into a thimble.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Sometimes I think if you didn't have me, there wouldn't be a single person in the world who really understood you._ \-- James Buchannan Barnes
> 
>  
> 
> This is a smut chapter, so if you're not into that, there's not terribly much plot in here... stop reading after the first section break

There was something about freedom that people took for granted, Bucky thought. 

That it existed _at all_.

A lot of people paid lip service to the idea of freedom, and they weren’t really free.

Maybe no one was really free.

But Bucky had been a prisoner inside his own head. Sure, there were still going to be consequences for the things he’d done, both as a Hydra operative and otherwise. But he could, at least, face them, clear in his own mind.

Free. In his own mind.

Wanda was at his side, a perfect, beautiful beacon. Symbolic, really.She was the living, breathing metaphor for everything he’d been through; torn down inside her own head, and set free on her own will.

A freed slave can never, truly, be free. Only the one who’s fought for it, bled for it, killed their master.

“We’ll have to find them,” Bucky said. “Eventually.”

“Hydra,” she agreed. “Or they’ll find us.”

“Eventually.”

Hydra was supposed to be dead and gone, but Bucky knew better than that. Ideology couldn’t be put in a jar and snuffed out like a candle. It didn’t matter the faces or the names, the slogans or the sayings. There was always going to be someone, somewhere, who thought people should be ruled.

And a lot of damn people in the world were willing to let it happen.

“There’s always going to be someone,” Wanda said. “Someone who doesn’t see us as people, but as tools.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Bucky said. “Together.”

“Always.”

They had bid farewell to Ward and Kira somewhere north of the old Hydra base. 

“The best thing we can do for each other,” Wanda had said, “is to forget the other exists.”

Ward had given Bucky a burner phone with one contact number in it. Outside of Wanda’s sight. Just in case. Ward knew the score. Bucky didn’t want to know more; Ward’s plans weren’t necessarily evil and all-hail-hydra encompassing, but he wasn’t a good man, didn’t seem to see a need to try to be one.

But they would not have been free without him.

So as far as Bucky was concerned, Grant Ward was owed. One favor.

“So, what do we do now?” Wanda wondered. She was swinging their arms between them like a kid, and Bucky found it oddly charming.

“Mission’s complete,” he said, feeling the faint chill of that word usage in his blood. But maybe he was always going to think in terms of missions. It wasn’t a bad thing; it was just being organized. “After battle care. Food, medical if necessary. Shower. Sleep. Celebrate.”

Wanda slanted a look at him, knowing exactly what that meant. Her smile was tinged with just enough sly humor for him to know she felt the same way. Or maybe it was the bond. Didn’t matter. 

“I meant more after tomorrow plans,” Wanda said. “Are we going back to Sokovia? Steve’s still planning to work, I think. You know-- save the world, bust illegal arms dealers. That’s going to get him into trouble, eventually.”

“Steve does not always have a bigger picture mentality going on,” Bucky pointed out. “You really want to try this downlow, recovery of Hydra operatives thing?”

“Yeah, or maybe rule the world?” she suggested, half laughing. “Everyone else has done a bang up job so far.

“You’d be terrific at it,” Bucky agreed. “Queen Wanda.”

“House of M,” she said. “You can be my royal consort.”

“Long live the queen.”

They reached their hotel, and it didn’t look like anyone had been in the room at all, not even the cleaning staff.

Good.

Bucky did a quick sweep to make sure, but it seemed this part of their cover, at least, was still safe.

“All clear, your majesty,” Bucky said. 

“Then as your first royal order,” she said, stretching out one hand to point at him imperiously. “Take off those ridiculous clothes and get in my bed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bucky said.

* * *

“Lie down,” Wanda told him, over her shoulder.

“Do you always give orders in bed, your Majesty?” His eyes went dark and almost dangerous, mouth opened and he licked his lips, trying in vain to disguise how much he wanted her. The thrill of it shot through Wanda’s belly, a visceral response.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes, I’ll let you give me orders.”

She watched him work out that logic. “Oh, will you, now?”

“But not today. Today, strip, and get on the bed. Or do you need me to tie you up.”

“Sometimes,” Bucky agreed. “But not today.”

Her body flared at that image, wondering what it would be like to hold her man down, and then lift him up.

“You like that idea,” Bucky said. He wasn’t hesitating to get out of his tactical gear, but it did take a while. Buttons and buckles and zips and cross held patches.

“We can talk about it. Lay down.”

Bucky scrambled on to the bed, his breath rough and hoarse, watching her.

Wanda took her time, not meaning, precisely, to tease him, but her mind was so busy, presenting pictures of Bucky, held down, tied up, visited with a torrent of sensual delights, that she couldn’t move any faster.

Bucky wasn’t complaining. He watched her remove each piece of clothing, wordless, wanting, until she was naked in front of him. 

But she was teasing. And something in his eyes made her want to continue to tease him. Instead of moving to join him on the bed, Wanda looked him over, like a dessert case.

He was beautiful, muscles standing out under bronzed skin, scars livid, but telling the story of his life. His face was most beautiful, lovely upturned lip and glowing, silver blue eyes. Perfect cheekbones, cleft chin. If there was a list of the perfect masculine features somewhere, they’d drawn only out of that bin when forming Bucky’s face. 

His gaze scorched her as he watched, and she ran her hands down her own body, watching him as he watched her.

Her fingers grazed over her own breasts, and Bucky’s breathing quickened in response. “Yeah?” he said, roughly. Eager, voice shaking.

“Uh-huh,” she answered him, thumbing over the peaks. Her skin heated and she knew she was blushing. She’d masturbated before, of course she had, but it was usually one hand between her legs, feverish, as she tried to get off before Pietro woke up, before anyone noticed. She didn’t know much about what she liked.

Now seemed as good a time as any to find out. She remembered his hands on her, plucked at her own nipple and felt the jolt of sensation through her. “I like that,” she told him, as if he didn’t know.

“I could do it better.”

“You’ll get your chance,” she said. “Eventually.”

One hand left off teasing her breast, the nipple still stiff and perking in the cooler air of their room, slid down her body until she was standing, legs spread a little, the finger of one hand between her legs.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, again, leaning up on his metal elbow to watch more closely. “S’okay if I join you?” He stroked his fingers lightly down his chest.

“Oh, oh, well, yes,” Wanda said, her eyes drawn helplessly to that roving hand. It was ridiculous how huge he was, broad and proud and hard. “Help yourself.”

“Oh, I intend to, ma’am,” Bucky said, that sly subservience in his voice. Like she owned him utterly, but it was okay, because she was just as much his. []

He was teasing himself at first, long fingers stroking up the shaft, cupping over the head. She watched, and did herself at the same time. But as he got more aroused -- she wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t because she was watching that made him so stimulated, or because she was doing for herself -- he got rougher. He circled himself and thrust into a loosely closed fist. Harder than she’d ever worked over a guy. She’d always been taught that men’s penises were delicate, fragile objects, and she treated them like spun glass.

That was all right, though. She didn’t know what men were taught, but most of them jabbed at her like she was a button that wasn’t working, and--

No one got quite what they wanted, really.

So maybe this was the best way to go about it; let him show her what he liked, let her teach him what she needed. Or maybe that was what soulmates were for; because nature had so badly screwed up the human race, made it so they had trouble understanding the other sex, that they didn’t know how to say what they needed, she had to make a bond between them, force them together.

Wanda wondered what it would be like if there were no soulmates, if everyone was completely lost and alone inside their head.

She didn’t quite shudder, but the thought sent a chill through her anyway. 

“Lemme see,” Bucky murmured, shifting his position a bit, following her thoughts even if she hadn’t given them voice. “Wanna watch you, pretty lady.”

She spread her thighs wider, even if that made it harder for her to reach a peak. Having her thighs pressed tight gave her better leverage. But she did as he asked, because he asked it.

Wanda spread her labia, showing off the folds, one finger on either side of her clit, a gentle pinch, and then flicked her fingers back and forth over it, one rubbing down, the other rubbing up, rapidly. 

The tiny node throbbed under her hand, swelled. She had to stop, realign her hand, the heel pressing against her mons and adding to the growing heat and pressure.

“Oh, that’s interestin’, doll,” Bucky said. “Works better for you like that?” He took his hand off his dick and reached for her. “Lemme try that.”

They had to shift around a lot until he got the angle right, her laying on her side, ass nestled in the cradle of his hips and his arm draped over her belly, but it worked, oh, how well it worked. She came almost immediately, jerking against him, feeling the hard length of him against her ass.

And while he didn’t quite stop, he did slow down a little, let her body recover and rest as she shivered underneath him. “Bucky--”

“I got you, pretty lady,” Bucky told her, and he slid between her pliant thighs, rubbing himself between her, stroking, rocking against her. “Feel you, so hot, so wet.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, not really knowing or caring what she was agreeing to. His fingers kept her from relaxing, his cock kept her anticipating. She arched her back, throwing one leg over his hips. It kept her splayed, exposed, every inch of her open to his touch, his caress, his sensual torment, and he took ruthless advantage. His hand moved from her breasts, teasing her nipples, sending jolts of sensation down into her belly, and then down again, between her legs.

He knew how to touch her now, and he did that, while lining himself up behind her, the head of his cock nudging at her entrance.

It was only a moment, it seemed, and at the same time, it was a perfect eternity, and then he was in her. Her inner walls clenched down and she squirmed, forming the perfect rhythm with him. Sliding in and out of her, his hand teasing at her clit while he stroked, it was impossible and unbearable and perfect and delicious all at the same time. She moaned, almost struggling, not sure if she wanted to get closer, or get away. Every nerve in her body was on fire, it was so good it was almost painful, and she couldn’t bear it one second longer--

And then she could, and he swept her away in it, her orgasm crashing down on her like a wave in the ocean, tumbling her over and over until she wasn’t sure where she ended and where he began.

She was gasping for breath, so hot, so sensitive, and when he shifted again, she batted at him, enough, enough, no more, I surrender.

Bucky chuckled wickedly in her ear. “Love you, pretty lady.”

He pulled out, leaving a wet smear on her thigh, and she knew in a few minutes it would be cold and sticky, but right now, she was just hot. She sprawled in the bed, starfish and let the air cool her. “Love you, too.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _But everyone's story begins once upon a time...and it's up to us to cherish the time we're given to ensure we live happily ever after._ \-- Wanda Maximoff

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap...
> 
> If you read the comics, you'll notice this sets up Bucky and Wanda for an alternate version of the Winter Soldier 2018 run

_Three months later_

“I thought you worked for SHIELD,” Bucky said.

Sharon Carter -- he still sort of thought of her as Steve’s girl, even though they both said it wasn’t going to work out (probably because Steve was stupid, but that was a rant for another day) -- faced him across the restaurant's booth. “I did. And Steve pulled that down around our ears. And then I worked for the CIA, up until you happened. Again. I think it’s in our blood, or something. Carter women commit treason for Rogers.”

“It ain’t workin’ out well for you,” Bucky said. Wanda shifted next to him.

“No, it’s not,” Carter said. “But I got a new job, and a new offer. Steve tells me you two are trying to put together some Hydra rehab program.”

“Get the people out who need to be out, who want to be out,” Bucky said. “Steve and Nat and the others, they want to do the big things, break open Hydra prisons, fight the good fight.”

“Get the glory,” Wanda added. “And people like us--” she linked their hands together on the table “--we fall behind. We are forgotten. Collateral damage. Even trying to do the right thing, for the wrong reasons. Or the wrong thing, for the right reasons. It is so hard to see, from the inside.”

“I hear you,” Sharon said. “I’m part of that collateral damage. All I ever wanted to do was help people.”

“We think this will work,” Bucky said. “It ain’t gonna be flashy. No supersuits and newspaper headlines. Steve said you might have contacts to make this work.”

“I do,” Sharon said. She waited until the waitress came by again and checked their coffee. All they were drinking was coffee (well, tea for Wanda) and talking. Honestly, they probably looked suspicious, but the waitress didn’t seem to mind.

“Here’s the problem,” she continued. “My boss wants to have a conversation with you, and it is imperative that this conversation never, ever get back to Rogers. You two -- if you want to work with me, be funded and relatively protected -- are going to have to agree to that.”

“Who is funding you?” Wanda asked.

“That’s part of the secret,” Sharon said. “I think you can guess, but right now, you don’t _know_ , you can’t prove it, and if you talk to Steve about it, I will know. And you will never see me again. That’s the price my help costs.”

_Stark._

Wanda didn’t so much say it as she mouthed the word into the air, like a demon given its due.

Sharon didn’t bother to acknowledge it with anything more than one raised eyebrow. As far as Bucky could tell, Sharon was already bored with their theatrics.

Steve had sent Stark a phone with a letter; if you need us, Steve had said. 

But maybe -- just maybe -- Stark didn’t need them. Because Stark was already working the other side of the coin.

“Do you trust him?” Bucky wasn’t sure if he was asking if Sharon trusted Stark… or if she trusted _Steve_.

“I think we’ve all seen that who I place my faith in has about a fifty-fifty success rate,” she said. “I joined SHIELD because I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought I could help people.”

“SHIELD was an organization. Even when people individually got good intentions, organizations have rotten apples. And you gotta throw them out, or the whole barrel goes bad,” Bucky said.

“I think you’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it’s going to go,” Sharon said. “I trust him. He trusts me. You two… are on probation.”

Bucky nodded. “That’s fair.”

“Do you think this is a good idea?” Wanda demanded.

“Do you think you were wrong about him?” Bucky wondered. “You blame him for your parents. He blames me for his. Everyone was wrong. Can you admit that, accept that?” 

“Yes,” Wanda said, softly. “Yes, I can accept that.”

“And what about him? Do you think _he_ can trust us?”

“You came out on the other side, Barnes,” Sharon said. “Hydra tried to destroy you. Everything that made you a human, good, bad, otherwise. And when you got out, got clear, you didn’t decide to burn Hydra to the ground in revenge. You didn’t hurt innocent people, or even people who were just doing their jobs. Instead, you come to me with this perfect idea. Let’s help the people that no one else will. Even if he doesn’t trust you? I do.”

Bucky exchanged one glance with his soulmate, and that was all it took. Wanda was on board. 

“We’re in,” he said.

“Great,” Sharon said. “For safety, you probably won’t meet face to face for a while. Let’s get some missions under our belts, some notches in our headboard, before we go getting all excited.”

“A woman after my own heart,” Wanda said. Bucky could sense the hesitation in her. She didn’t want to see Stark. Not yet. Then, very tentatively, “Is Viz… is he okay?”

“The Vision is fine, physically,” Sharon said. “He and War Machine have been running ops together, and keeping an eye on some fledglings. As for other things, well, we all have to deal with a little heartbreak from time to time.”

Wanda nodded. “I understand.”

“If you’re ready to sign on, I’ve got transportation for you that won’t require us going through a metal detector,” Sharon said.

“Where are we going?”

“Shelbyville, Indiana.”

**Author's Note:**

> ** removed all references to uncomfortable subject matter at the request of a reader


End file.
